Transplant - Hanging Gardens                                                    

A garden is an image of a world concept and the stage for an idea. It is said Nebudkadnezar around 600 to 700 BC build a wonderful garden for his homesick wife in the hot, flat and sandy Babylon. This artificial surrounding was green and smelling, mountainous and blossoming.

A garden consists of insights and it is the assertion of another world. To transplant an idea from one place to another. To spread out, to plant, is constant developement und assertion.

To fill up a portable sack with soil and ist the first step to erect a new world. What will grow there, what kind of construction will arise? The Bags are a request to a next assertion or creation and its realizsation.

If we travel abroad we take something from there and take it into our own world and our own way of seeing things. Worlds are carried around, synthesized from many single parts, again taken apart and rebuild again. In this way also plants reproduce and spread by themselves or by the hand of man.

Is a dwelling house more artificial than the tree planted in front of it? Culture is often seen as opposed to nature. According to this nature is something untouched and autonomously living, while culture is the world made by man. But: Nature is something that has to be thought of and imagined as nature. Our image of nature is already culture, it is cultural influenced. As soon as we percieve something, culture is happening; even though we are ourselves part of nature.

We put structures into this world that get a life of their own and that can be percieved by us anew. Nature invents culture and culture is nature. Humans have the task to invent themselves, they can't do anything else.

Man divides the world into modules and synthesise them again. They create order in our perception. We mainly percieve what we have put in order for ourselves. Things in order are considered culture. Wild nature is unusually not considered a part of it. This pair of opposites of wild untamed nature and cultivated decorative and agricultural plants (gardens) has its origin in an order-and perception-system created by man. We stand as metaphor and analogy to ourselves.

To put the world in order, to divide and reassemble it anew is like its very invention. To divide the world also means to destroy it. Modules invite to exchange, to play, to transport further on. They are a construction set for something new. For a new garden.

Ilka Meyer