Since 2009 Atelier Le Balto has been conceiving, drawing and gardening the garden of Villa Romana - Florence, a place where they are cultivating the view through the adoption of mingling perspectives, volumes and lines, where they continue to shape the spacial experiences of the visitors walking along a path, crossing the olive grove or sitting beneath a magnolia tree.
Yann Monel, Il giardino di Villa Romana 2015 [Travail de jardinage de l'atelier le balto, Observation en décembre 2014]
What your going to listen to, is not a gardening lesson; it is rather a sort of randomly recorded diary of their last intervention during the Samaine de Jardin [April 2013]: they went for heterogeneous actions beautifully orchestrated in diverse zones in the garden, openign up many views, letting the sight wandering from the more representative area to the margins and the neighbourhood.
We asked few questions to Veronique Faucheur, Marc Pouzol e Marc Vatinel around their mindset and about landscape. Hope yu will enjoy the listening.
Translation German-English:
Veronique [01:20] - "what you do in the garden must emerge - what stays, what not - it's always like an intuition that has to mature..."
Veronique [02:22] - " You see Marc who's pruning the Magnolia tree. If he pays attention to it, he can sense its structure, he can understand how it's growing up. At the beginning he just cuts a few branches in order to let the sight run through the tree, from below to the sky. If the sky is visible, you can better see both the leaves and the tree itself in its entirety...."
Marc Pouzol [09:00] - "If we can take this little 9mtx9mt squared field as a landing mark, we can see many trees down there, while up-there another small area is connected downwards at the bottom of the garden by a sort of main raod. Drawings helped us a lot but here, all these elements mingle; a trick to work on site is not to turn everything over but just to ruffle thing a bit. I'm now standing in the fig grove: the trees will grow in 6 years, they'll become big and there will be a fig grove here and a olive grove there...this is our idea, more or less..."
Veronique [10:16] - We've thought it through, we have observed the scene from above e from below; it would have made sense it there were 4 or 5 trees in line to form a line but there were just 2 and one of them was just hampering the path [that's why we had to cut it...]. Angelika says that the beauty of the garden is clearer from an external perspective, I think that the garden take its own strenght from the sequence of forms and shapes..."
Veronique Faucheur, Marc Pouzol & Marc Vatinel a Villa Romana, ph.Yann Monel
Here you can read a conversation between them and Angelika Stepken, director of Villa Romana.