Garden of unearthly consolations

«The garden was full of discordant cries, singing and chirping of birds, roar, squeak and squeal of animals.  Never before Christo had seen such unusual animals. Unprecedented animals lived in this garden».

Gardens always have been particular cultural codes. The garden is the quintessence of the current moment and natural narrative. A landscape park of Romanticism, a regular park of French Enlightenment, the archetype of the entire historical discourse about the garden – it is the Garden of Eden.

Nowadays we recognize the deromtization of nature which is now a history of ecological disasters, consequences of the Antropocene era, the economical era and at the same time it implies active development of dark ecology, return to the Medieval attitude of creepiness and danger of the world shining with monsters and illnesses as a divine punishment. Permanently erasing borders between living and dead, people do not stop erecting «gardens» like concepts of new possibilities for talking about the «earthly». Nature in its artificiality acquires a new divinity, getting out of human control through different disasters, mutations, global changes of the landscape and climate, also learning the disappointing ways of coexistence with humankind.

What is it like, this new Arcadia? It is a half terrifying garden, full of medieval symbolism in a new interation, half laboratory of the researcher from the «Solaris» station looking for the answer in the extraterrestrial intelligence of the planet. Like the garden of the Argentine surgeon Salvator from the novel Amphibian man, it is inhabited by mystical creatures, people nourishing with artificial meat. Stones are shedding tears for the time of their own freedom from man. And a man is still dreamily staring at the sky, creating new constellations with phone applications based on food wastes. This wondrous new garden is strange and crammed with attempts of ethereal consolation.  

For the group exhibition, Alexander Sedelnikov provided several works from the "Accelerate" series.

Photo: Anna Marchenko