The exhibition deals, in an extremely timely fashion, with issues of sustainability, preservation and environment. Clément is a French landscape architect who has spent much of his life working toward the preservation and recuperation of endangered species of plants. In his numerous private and public garden projects across Europe and Asia he has overturned traditional, formal gardening practices to adopt the principle of, in his words, "working with and never against nature."
The installations Clément created for this exhibition do an excellent job at convincing the viewer of the urgency of his mandate. One of the exhibition's absolutely most breathtaking features is a chandelier he created, composed of objects and plant specimens he gathered at an empty lot in Montreal, each encased in a raindrop-shaped chunk of clear plastic. Among the findings are pieces of trash like cellphone casings alongside pretty pink flowers and blades of grass. His point is to draw attention to the lost spaces in our overdeveloped contemporary landscape: In these abandoned spaces, few natural species
The greatest concern for Swiss architect Philippe Rahm is waste. He proposes an architecture free from its traditional determinants of function by using climatic conditions as tools to create buildings. In other words, rather than presuppose every home must have a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom and a living space all in distinct areas of the house, Rahm proposes we calculate the space's climatic characteristics and then arrange the whereabouts of our daily activities around them. For example, we may set up a sleeping space right next to the stove on which we've cooked our dinner if we enjoy sleeping in a warm environment.
His very avant-garde installation for this exhibition consists of two rooms: one white room, enclosed with Plexiglas doorways, inhabited only by neon lights and a multitude of sensors; and one black room, dominated by a table on which plans are laid out and a large screen that tabulates, basically, the information collected by the sensors in the white room. According to the data retrieved, a computer program reshuffles uses that may be made of the space, and illustrates them. It's really cool.
Which is kind of the general impression left by this exhibition. Not only are the points made intelligent and of the utmost human importance, the way they are made is sensually pleasing in a big, big way.
Environment: Approaches for TomorrowAt the CCA (1920 Baile), to April 22
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