Repository-me (2010)
Proposal for the 12th edition of the International Garden Festival, Grand-Métis, Québec.
Chow Mo-wan: In the old days, if someone had a secret they didn’t want to
share... you know what they did?
Ah Ping: Have no idea.
Chow Mo-wan: They went up a mountain, found a tree, carved a hole in it, and whispered the secret into
the hole. Then they covered it with mud. And leave the secret there forever.
Ah Ping: What a pain! I’d just go to get laid.
Chow Mo-wan: Not everyone’s like you.
“In the Mood for Love” (2000) by Wong Kar-wai
Repository-me is a receptacle of secrets composed of a rammed earth wall that nests a series of holes. It is inspired by the ancient Chinese myth that film director Wong Kar-wai eloquently reenacts in the film’s final sequence.
The process of nesting our secrets in the wall entails fixing a plant on the secrets lair and therefore a hidden garden will start to emerge. Through time, the original image of the wall will be blurred and indistinct like an old memory. With this process, a mood of introspection but also of communality is sustained.
This garden aims to acquire a poetic quality through the exploration of the building technique of earth architecture. The developed detail of the rammed earth wall with perforations enables plants to sit and survive hanging against the wall. Ultimately this built object will literally be part of the landscape, will emerge from it, with this display one can deviate the earth’s profane character and turn it into sacred. The poetic aspect of Repository-me rests therefore on a sophisticated understanding of a traditional technique like rammed earth walls being reappropriated into contemporary terms.
Suggested plants:
Grasses, clematis and ipomoeas
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