Study About The Construction Of A Garden

Inspired by Victor Hugo's text, the project uses photography, reinterpretations of the pictorial work of Claudio de Lorena, and museum archives, as the main tools for his composition.

A garden is a space for the manifestation of a beauty that must be pampered. Its construction implies care and the desire to perpetuate our existence. Created with our best efforts and wealth. Perhaps the best description of this attempt was given by Victor Hugo when he was imagining the space of the Old Summer Palace of Beijing and its gardens, destroyed during the Second Opium War:

“Imagine an inexpressible construction. Something like a lunar building, and you will have the Summer Palace. Build a dream with marble, jade, bronze, and porcelain. Cover it with precious stones. Wrap it in silk. Make a sanctuary here. Put in gods. Put monsters inside. Built by architects who are poets, the thousand and one dreams of the thousand and one nights. Suppose, in a word, a kind of dazzling cave of human fantasy in the form of a temple and a palace: this is how this monument will be”.

The starting point of the project is the news of an illness. Guillermo has been my mother's companion for the last twenty-five years and the closest figure that I've ever had to a father. My intention is to narrate the last years of his life, his love story, and the attempt to build a future from his absence. Through a project that aspires to be a kind of monument to his memory and a reflection on the passage of time. Using the house where they lived as a scenery; the portraiture, and a series of family objects treasured by my mother like the pieces of a family museum. These objects, furtively decontextualized of their original use, are transformed into a kind of ephemeral sculptures or models of utopian projects for a future garden. Where the strange enters into the realm of the domestic. Mixing reality with dreams, in an exercise that pursues the most sublime beauty as a way of narrating, in a symbolic way, the progress of the disease, their love story, and the passage of time.