Beyond Borders Life Abounds
Borders are everywhere: between countries, between populations, between outside & inside, between disciplines, between genders… In early childhood, we see a being in the making, open to exploration and discovery. In adulthood, we too often see a being who knows, who has become, even though there are so many frontiers still to be explored to better understand what lies on either side of a line, and why it exists. Adults, in the light of early childhood, should ask the question of why, as much as what it implies in terms of what, for whom and how. This attempt at discernment opens up the field of criticism. So let's open our eyes and senses, let's judge for ourselves, let's discern and analyze what's good to indulge in and what's not. Let's not let our imaginations, emotions and reason be siphoned off by the prevailing noises.
Landscape design has to be cultivated from many points of view. It's up to each of us to choose the one that opens up a promising path for the benefit of ourselves and the greater number. The figure of Fort Nagaur is fertile in what it inspires as a critical dialectic. An hybrid of Architecture and Landscape, the fort covers an area of around 15 ha, and has undergone several incarnations over the ages, from the 4th century (of which nothing remains), with adobe structures and a 1.5km enclosure, to the 12th century, to the remains of the present day, whose main purpose is to defend the site and distance it from the outside world – in other words, to act as a frontier. This distancing presupposes an autonomy of survival while cultivating resources above & below, outside & inside, visible & invisible in a territory constrained by the hazards of the semi-arid climate of the Rajasthan region, bordering the Thar desert on the West and punctuated by the summer monsoons on the edge of the fertile Chambal valley to the South East,
It's not the child who becomes an adult, it's becoming a child that makes a universal youth […] It's becoming itself that is a child.
Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari, Mille plateaux, Capitalisme et schizophrénie, 2 (1980).
The aim of this term is to explore a laboratory of living processes from a number of angles for the purposes of a landscape project.