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NEWSLETTER
Gardens are the main material of Gabriela Albergaria’s work. She uses them as a tool that is simultaneously narrative, aesthetic, anthropological and mnemonic. In any of these terms and these functions, gardens carry out the role of a speech within her work, a speech that is declined according to the specific conditions of each project, using a journey through the issues of landscape, its importance within the context of the construction of social experiences and the memory of the colonial process in the migration of vegetable species.
In the diversity of the supports she uses in her work she defines situations that call upon the spectator to the rediscovery of the place through references to the collective memories that pass through them.
Gardens are in themselves powerful metaphorical constructions, in essence alien to the romantic idea of landscape in the sense that they do not stand out as a fragment, but as an allegory of a world. It is from this configuration of the garden as a world that Gabriela Albergaria’s work arises, much more than from an idea of landscape. In other words, her projects are developed more from the idea that the place of a garden is that of a device that generates an articulation of experiences taken from a historical and social configuration and less from an aesthetic of landscape as a visual ordering of a fragment of the world. Her method is that of understanding the operational mechanics of that micro-cosmos and promoting an intervention that comments on botanical procedures that define a lexicon, a grammar from these methodologies that possess names: grafting, biocenosis, classification, cutting.
The result of this spurious cloning between the universe of botany and artistic devices is always guided according to the memory of artistic genres, to the use of drawing, of sculpture – or more recent ones, like photography, installation, or performances. Thus her interventions are centred on the defining within the exhibition space of situations that feed off a world that in itself is allegorical, and which is produced from a technique and from a culture in order to define a new situation devolved to the beholder’s share (to use Ernest Gombrich’s term) and to his share – as landscape, now fragmentary and bearing a clear determining aesthetic and, one that orders the field of sight.
Thermal, the exhibition that she is presenting now, is made up of two sculptures and three drawings that occupy the whole of the space of the White Pavilion. Starting from the situation of the garden of the Palácio Pimenta, Gabriela Albergaria takes the relationship with the typology of the leisure garden, the echo of the practices of storing and development of natural species and the fictional capacity of the space of the garden as her subjects in order to produce a system of internal references and connections to the architecture of the pavilion. On the ground level a redesigned tree occupies the first room. The methodology of this sculpturising of a tree uses violent and particularly crude processes such as driving steel spikes through the trunk of the tree, the suspending of the tree on cable that lift it up from the floor, the eliminating of the foliage and the grafting of a giant galvanized steel screw which, ironically, would allow it to be mechanically replaced in the ground. There is an echo of extreme violence in the process that goes from the erasing of its botanical identity to the sacrificial system of its suspension, transforming its conversion into a sculpture into a painful and almost brutal process, reinforced by its being imposed onto the space.
In the next room there is a sculpture made of soil, on an almost minimal scale of mass, which repeats the operation of conversion of a now sterilised thermic soil bed, with the upper floor working as an inverted repetition of these process through a didactics of the representation, produced through drawings of landscape and drawings that as a whole produce an explanation about the heat retention produced by soil in a greenhouse: the bigger the greenhouse the greater the heat it gives off.
The exhibition (apparently) makes it explicit how the conversion of the space of the White Pavilion into an enormous hot-house takes place, with the title referring to the process of thermal preservation of fertile land – which, possessing a reference to Joseph Beuys, constructs a machine that that shifts through the metaphor of heat and fertility, now subverted through processes of sterilization and museumisation.
This conversion of the Pavilion also takes place through a performance work that Gabriela Albergaria has specifically built for the inauguration of the exhibition – which can only be used on that day by the spectators – which consists of a structure that provides a specific and outside view on the exhibition room, articulating the antinomy between nature and artificiality, reality and representation, aspects which form the centre of her work.
In the final analysis the process of this complex device lies in an ironic machine about the artificiality of nature, about the process of artificialisation that is inherent to garden architecture, as it is to art.
Let us imagine that some garden peacock, in the baroque caricature of the excess of its feathers, might understand this conversion and, naturally and confined, let out its shrill cry.
1. The XX century brought two paths, which often cross, for artistic practices: a path that derives from a certain criticism of the image, begun in the XIX century and which intends to reflect upon the conditions of the verisimilitude of the image, whether through pictorial processes or through the use of film, photography or video (drawing is another matter); and a path that proposes to produce situations, most of them circumstantial, or environmental, that use devices taken from other dimensions of human expression, namely architecture, theatre and music – or, in more metaphorical terms, sociology, politics or anthropology.
Of course, none of these ways represents a closed path. Often the use of the image starts from an extra-artistic proposal (psycho-analysis, in the case of surrealism, sociology or politics, in the case of the more documentary forms), or sometimes the situation comes from an absolute aesthetic or artistic primacy – phenomenological, as is the case of the paths that are most linked to formal problems or those of perception. Yet the two approaches can be read in the overall view of artistic practice, and they set up different processes of relationships with the work of art, requesting different registers for our appreciation, different resources, sometimes more connected to processes of sensitivity and on other occasions more connected to cognitive processes, or to decisions taken as “by concept”.
Gabriela Albergaria’s path is particularly revealing of this second instance in the sense that her works are processes of sharing of circumstances resulting in interventions, often closer to the real, at other times to history or to memory, but which always lead to life experience situations for the spectator.
Gabriela Albergaria’s work uses a device that for her works as a speech – we might call it a language, but it is more than that – and which consists of the use of gardens as an instrument for her work. This device has often been taken as a link to landscape; yet her focus in using the garden (whether through works installed in them or which derive from the botanical system itself, either through models, plans, drawings, photographs or narratives), is somewhat more precise than a broad interest in landscape would be. This is a question of starting from the XVIII century garden in its many different versions – the romantic garden, or the botanical garden, or the English ornamental and leisure garden – to then find processes that have to do with collective cultural movements, or with the subjectivity of the small individual story, with collective memory, or to the contrary, with memories that run through personal narratives.
Thus, Gabriela Albergaria’s work uses the garden – leaving open the possibility of being able to use any other type of devices, as, indeed, has happened in the past. Over the last years, however, this has been her device and her tool.
2. In order to understand Gabriela Albergaria’s path and her relationship with illuminist gardens, it is necessary to realise that the garden is a powerful metaphorical mechanism that, in its complexity, brings together a memory of or a remission in relation to an experience of the world, as well as being symptomatic of the golden era of the colonial period, whether this is of British, German, Dutch, Spanish or Portuguese colonialism. We may, to start off with, state that Albergaria’s interest for the mechanism of the garden has firstly to do with her condition as a Portuguese artist. Indeed, the colonial reference is particularly lively in the botanical gardens, in the sense that they bear witness to a type of migration (as Susan Sontag would state, the processes of globalization do not start in the XX century, but in 1492), that of the vegetable species that reconfigured our landscapes. For a Portuguese person it is hard to imagine Lisbon without palm trees, just as it would be impossible to imagine India without peppers, Brazil without coconut trees or Germany without potatoes. But that is the pre-colonial reality, and the migration of vegetable species provoked by the colonial processes radically transformed the landscape’s living experience (like the feeding and morphology of the soils), setting up new forms of landscape identity and cultural negotiation. Gardens are the most synthetic and all-embracing form of demonstrating this process of transformation, turned into a spectacle of the rational system of their process of organisation.
In this sense gardens are a sensitive form of demonstrating a system of thought, the European rationalism that seeks to make an inventory, to catalogue, to organise and to show the result of the cultural universe of the imports and migrations of the species provoked by the colonial processes (and its motive as well).
So, a first reason for Gabriela Albergaria’s interest in for gardens as a device is connected to an attempt to map out the processes of cultural contamination that were started through colonial movements.
In that sense, her concern for the universe of gardens, from which she has come to construct a certain botanical knowledge – and we will return to this matter further on – is not that of pure reflection on the phenomenological question of the landscape, nor is it the result of a consideration of the processes of transformation of the territory. If the first process, which is very common in contemporary art, would move towards a question of representation, the second one would constitute an anthropological, or sociological extension of the issues connected to a distributive, mapped view of the territory that the gardens configure. On another level, Gabriela Albergaria has been carrying out an approach to the sensitive issues of cultural, physical, political and (globally) communal construction that preside over the garden as a scientific, ornamental and leisure device, yet always maintaining he approach on the level of the exercise of the gaze towards a hypothetical horizon. Thus the matter of the organization of the gardens and their ratios provide tools for the construction of interventions that always keep to the scope of existence as experience, in the sense expressed by John Dewey.
3. In Gabriela Albergaria’s course there is the presence of a lineage that one may trace back to Robert Smithson, precisely through this dimension of the exercise of a criticism sensitive to the field of experience.
If Smithson saw that the landscape was not a support for a question of representation, his option was due to an attempt to come away from an artistic practice that configured an aesthetic in favour of an art that defined a field of experience. To this end, Smithson finds a process of intervention on the landscape that results in a thinning down of the artistic practice until nothing more is left than the sharpness of space and time (as Gary Shapiro states), in order to then give up the Kantian notion of space and time itself in favour of a contraction in the idea of the place. To a certain extent this same option is taken by Gabriela Albergaria in the works that imply a direct intervention in a non-museological context. Her interventions result in the production of places, that is, of possibilities of living specific to a determined spatio-temporal contraction that is only possible because its determining factor is the cultural and affective experience of a situation – which obviously includes a specific location in space and time, but which is not, in the final analysis, defined by these vectors, but by a third one, which is its existence for the spectator as an experience.
One may thus understand the dubious character that her interventions may possess in terms of the aesthetic relationship which they provoke: as they are not determined by the modern idea of space-time, they do not live off the possibility of aesthetic founding, but rather of their existence as artistic values determined by concepts, precepts and affections, in a triangulating of ductile and variable outlines.
4. The same thing cannot be inferred from her sculptural works, her drawing and her photographs. Indeed, her sculptures are metamorphic creatures from an idea of a tree (a tree that is in fact real). In order to make them she uses a defined set of procedures for gathering of species that she will later mutilate, reconstruct and re-assemble. In the first place she only uses trees that have been condemned – either because they are dead or because they have been condemned to being cut down – rejecting the possibility of working with viable specimens. In the second place she records on video and photographs the whole process of collecting the tree she will manipulate, thus extending the sculpture work to all of the preparation process; that is, defining a clearing performing scope for her sculpture. In the third place, she does not produce the sculpture from a previous drawing, but, to the contrary, it is from the dismantling of the tree that she finds the drawing of its future spatial configuration. In this manner, the creating of her sculptures of “assisted” trees possesses a constructive process that is very close to the final result. This means that its metamorphic and apparently evolving character indeed corresponds to a type of construction closer to drawing than to sculpture as a methodology. This fact has to do with Gabriela Albergaria’s discourse itself, in which drawing occupies an important place not only as an artistic practice, but as a metaphorical process of artistic creation itself. Indeed, the beginning of the artist’s relationship with the universe of gardens began with the systematic, almost daily drawing of gardens – specifically the gardens of Berlin during her residence at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, later in Paris, during her stay at the Cité des Arts (from which would result the interesting book produced in collaboration with the critic and curator Joana Neves). This diary-like method solidified a daily practice of drawing, in its aspects as note taking, as mind mapping, as a record, documentation or preparation, or finally as a “work”.
Such a profusion of aims in an artistic practice is only possible in drawing and in photography, and, in this sense, Gabriela Albergaria’s attraction for the use of photography fits the same pattern of need that made her systematically use drawing.
5. In the case of photography, however, there is an important link to the issue of scale and the use of models.
The first use of photography in her work appears with the first models of gardens. In fact, for her this was a matter of building hybrid universes, spaces moulded from the structure of the garden, at the time linked to an idea of personal memory, namely to a certain instance of recollection and childhood. Yet these models formed fundamental test data banks for the development of methodologies of representation, of work on scale and of the understanding of the botanical processes themselves. Curiously, the consequences were dual and divergent. On the one hand, Gabriela Albergaria started to need to photograph her models in order to, in that operation, define a new field of duplicity: in photography scale becomes dubious, proposing a new field of research – the ambiguity of scale itself. And that ambiguity needs to be worked on the level of the suspension of disbelief, both in the model support and in the photograph support. If in the model support this is a matter of perfecting and developing adequate languages and codes to define internal coherences for the models, in the photograph support it is a question of building dramatic aspects, cryptic narratives and a whole imagery that defines a world – or rather that defines a place.
Thus, in dealing with a question of representation, Gabriela Albergaria found the question of the place as her topos.
The second consequence of her working with models results from the leap it provided between the universe of memory as a field of subjectivity, connected to personal experience and to intimacy, to a second understanding of the processes of memory in the sense of the cultural sharing of matrixes – in the sense of Warburgian Nachleben.
This means that if the models appear as a personal experimental expression of projected places, the adopting of codes of representation implies the defining of fields of sharing with the spectator. Then these fields raise issues of common scope – and the necessary passage to a plane of intersubjectivity.
In a wider sense, the adopting of a typology close to the methodologies of the project (namely that of architecture) thus brought about, almost in an exemplary manner, the passage to the inevitable domain of the civic, or even of the political, in Gabriela Albergaria’s work.
The use of drawing has been, as we have seen, a continuous axis, and to a certain extent a structuring element in Gabriela Albergaria’s work. We have referred to the diary-like origin of its use in relation to the gardens, as an early method of approach and relationship. However, we are now referring to the existence of a drawing that appears as a “work” (although it is clear that in the fluidity of Gabriela Albergaria’s processes, the status of determined uses of supports may be interchangeable), that is, which implies a thought process on the methodological and aesthetic questions of drawing itself. In that sense, the question of scale, as well as the introduction of a method of composite construction (for example, with the use of large panels made up of a set of drawings, or the hybrid use of drawings and photographs as two equal instances of representation) provides the possibility of a work on the narrative element, introducing a field of fictionality: in the composite drawings paths are stated, wanderings are proposed, along with contradictory points of view, etc. Stated in a different manner: the use that Gabriela Albergaria makes of drawing is close to a cinematographical view, because it brings awareness of a question, that of the “out of shot”. What is that out “out of shot”? It is the garden as a machine for producing meaning and critical capital.
In this manner her work always refers to an instance that is, in itself, a fictional category of her work, as if the game of fictionality were projected over the reality, making it an internal category of her process of suspension of disbelief.
In this sense Gabriela Albergaria’s gardens are a construction at the service of the effective problem that has been involving the whole of her path: how can we feel a work of art as if it were much more real than reality?
Only the artificiality of nature can provide a clue.
Modern man cannot establish his relationship with nature as a relationship of dominations (Descartes: Lords and Possessors of Nature) other than by establishing nature as a set of inert objects and society as the subject of a rational domain.
Any places can be an inhabitable space in the context of micro-communities that are redefined by the recurring use of a few square meters. As the vital space is reduced, the bodies adapt to the progressive diminishing of these circumscribed surfaces which are, even so, capable of guaranteeing some forms of survival.
Urban progress has prepared the recesses of a present life in which city-dwellers are more and more restricted to the undefined limits of built areas. It has redecorated the architecture with grand glass buildings supported by networks of welded iron and steel cables, the projects of an imaginary city, raised in the accumulation of images of body-objects surrounded by a forgotten and transformed nature.
Gabriela Albergaria works nature through a set of concerns that are related to lack of reference; that is, the idea of a nature that is subjected to successive processes of humanisation, and which is incapable of surviving in a world in which the proliferation of spectres and simulacra of natural environments goes beyond reality itself.
Through pre-established processes of organization that take the surrounding space into consideration, Albergaria reproduces a set of mediating actions between the natural elements and technology as an application of knowledge. In this way of proceeding there is a clear search for a solution of balance that is not aggressive to the side that, being removed from its natural environment, inevitably appears more fragile and dependent. For millions of years, nature dominated Man, setting out limits for him in all kinds of activities related to his survival. Nowadays the idea of a natural world seems to us to be something controllable and capable of being annulled in the name of concepts underlying notions of progress and development, which do not have to do with the satisfaction of basic needs.
In keeping to a scale of reference that refers to an essential symbology of nature, this work seeks to set off processes of recovery, not in the sense of a return to a purer original concept, but to protect, through the reproduction of a set of tasks of attention and care, with a strong metaphorical charge coming from this activity.
This exhibition, planned by the Vila Flor Cultural Centre, is based on the organisation of two territories, starting from totally different logics of presentation. In a contemporary approach that attempts to develop and explore the particular features of a specific place, possessing an enormous historical component, there is the bringing together of a set of works and ideas, with the aim of stimulating the establishing of dialogues and confrontations among the several elements present.
The first floor presents a set of mainly three dimensional works, laid out in a north-south longitudinal view, which suggests different mechanisms of approximation to nature. A drawing, like a sort of fragmented view of a tree-filled environment, made up of the exhaustive repetition of frames, proposes as ordering of the points of view towards the composition of a coherent space. On the opposite side, a series of trees are reconstructed from logs and lifeless waste wood; in the centre, a showing of a garden without any apparent intervention is placed on the top of a table, suggesting an idea of transportation and reintegration. On the side walls, taking advantage of the re-entering of the windows, two boxes with other gardens are laid out so that they may develop a relationship of prolonging, from the inside to the outside.
On the second floor, which is divided into two halves, facing east/west, the west windows and walls are used to narrate some historical references about the Vila Flor Palace Gardens, taken from publications about the building, and proposing a sort of gathering of facts through the drawing of the word. On the opposite side, to the east, a series of photographs of trees and boughs are completed through drawings.
The importance of this exhibition, and of Gabriela Albergaria’s work in general, is the possibility of finding mechanisms of establishing contracts among the meanings contained in her work and the spaces in which it is set. In avoiding recreating forms of allowing or sustaining biodiversity, a role that nowadays is exclusively confined to science, Albergaria tries to establish, within the absurd and the strangeness of the situations presented, an unleashing of exempt and free acts, capable of going beyond presuppositions directly related to the annulling or protection of the environment.
Urban societies have transplanted nature to weakened, digitally planned landscapes. Settings have been arduously edified on groundless acts of land use and planning for the conceiving of a new category of biological being, chosen only due to its photogenic qualities. No one can really conquer the spaces occupied by the collective upset and disturbance, nor re-live the extreme moments of surviving the past which are now lost in the extent of human noises, made up of desires impossible to bring about, at the same time as producing a multitude of careless abandons. Gabriela Albergaria deals with these and other subjects, through the reconstituting of a new plasticity based on these remains, on these by-products of memory carried to a mutation in which the manipulated images take on a second life in the redefined imperfection of the views of the body.
Artifice-Reason-Nature may seem, perhaps, a strange confluence of contrary and not immediately relatable propositions. But the creative work of Gabriela Albergaria strives always for reconciliation between what might at first appearance suggest the contrary aspects of art and nature. Her current project installation based on the Pfaueninsel (Peacock Island), Wansee, near Berlin, is yet again another of these subtle interventions and appealing propositions. Gabriela Albergaria has frequently sought to express issues of the Enlightenment Garden - a product of artifice and reality – as it has become mediated through subsequent stages of industrial and post-industrial manifestation. The Pfaueninsel project departs from the site of the Palm House (destroyed by fire in May, 1880), and built by the architect Albert Dietrich Schadow (1797-1869). The son of Friedrich Gottlieb Schadow (1761-1831), director of public works and palace building commissioner, he thereafter became an architectural follower of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), having met and worked with Schinkel on the New Pavilions in the Park at Charlottenburg Palace, in 1824-25. Thereafter, Albert Dietrich Schadow executed the Palm House, Pfaueninsel in the years 1829-31, following closely a draft design by Schinkel. Some indication through engravings and a painted record of the interior of the Palm House still exist, the latter executed between 1832-34, by the Cottbus-born artist Carl Eduard Ferdinand Blechen (1798-1840). The relevance to Albergaria being the use of iron and glass structures, something which cast the pretence of pseudo-natural reality within an early industrial framework. In this sense the Palm House represented an early example of the interface between industry and nature.
The development of Palm Houses and Greenhouse structures typified the newly formed industrialisation of nature in the nineteenth century, with its artificial interface and pseudo-natural elements. The Pfaueninsel itself, and by extension from the eighteenth century landscape and garden environments, elaborates a similar sense of faux-nature. This is articulated through the history and construction of follys (pseudo-buildings, found on the Pfaueninsel), where allusions to the past were increasingly placed under the rubric of a fanciful tableau or, later on, the full scale diorama (the term was first coined by Louis Daguerre in 1822). This penchant for the exotic thereafter turned into a full blown mid-nineteenth century Orientalism, but the Palm House was also allied to the eighteenth and nineteenth century developments of places like the Berlin Botanical and Zoological Gardens (origins 1679, and 1844 respectively). Albergaria thus engages with a complex matrix of interelated ideas, and these ideas not only play with the naturalness of artificiality, but through plant and environmental adaptation how the processes of the naturalisation of artifice takes place. However, her works must be read through the language of art, and not specifically that of science, though the artist never denies such scientific explanations as might exist. The questions posed by Albergaria remain open. Does what was artificially formed and conceived become increasingly natural to our psychically disposed use of modern consciousness? As a result, and given the nature of the diverse plants that once existed in the Palm House, issues of transplantation and colonialism are tested. By further implication, also a complex of historical, social, and political processes, are highlighted through her drawing and photographic installations. The fact that plant environments adapt over time delivers a sense of fictional reality to that which is born of artifice.
Gabriela Albergaria in all instances follows the pattern of historical research and development, thus her knowledge and documentary history of the Palm House, Pfaueninsel is a given aspect in her undertaking. But the actual departure of the idea for Under an Artificial Sky, is also linked to earlier works as in this instance the Cestos (Wicker Baskets) first exhibited in her project Collect, Transplantar, Coloniser, shown at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, in 2004/2005. These baskets have an associative history as to the portering of plants from their previous (and sometimes exotic) locations, to their artificially constructed environments in Europe – in this instance by reference to the Palm House, Pfaueninsel. They act therefore as a metaphor of transplantation, and are based on the original baskets first conceived by the famous French Jardin des Plants botanist and gardener Thouin in Paris - they were used for the expedition with Lapérousse (1785-1788). But more than that, and since they are themselves made of fibrous plant life, they double as a form of reference to adaptation and plant hybridity. This also reminds us of themes like grafting which also
appear frequently elsewhere in Albergaria's body of work.
The project Under an Artificial Sky, thus begins with the basket-reference and these form part of the installation. The main aspects, however, are large scale coloured pencil drawings developed through several parts (280 x 400cm), and are deliberately the basis of a fictionalised landscape. These are accompanied by drawings showing a variety of ornamental-decorative plant motifs used in architecture. In this case we find an immediate juxtaposition of artificial landscape, placed next to the hieratic and stylised abstractions from palms. The industrialisation of exotic motifs and pattern books were to have an enormous influence over architecture in the nineteenth century. On the walls of the installation there are also a series of placed texts, an approach Albergaria used previously with her gallery in Lisbon, and in a recent exhibition at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris. References to Goethe and botanical taxonomy apply, but in reality these quotes expose the hidden colonial intentions that lay behind the nineteenth century obsession with glasshouses, and their application and use in the service of industrialisation. One has only to think of the later but legendary Crystal Palace where the Great Exhibition took place in London, in 1851. Apart from their exotic contents, the plants appropriation and transportation to Europe was primarily economic, revealing almost exactly the same motivations of human exploitation and transportation from the colonies. As a Portuguese artist, Albergaria is ever aware of her own country's role in the playing out of colonialism. One of the quotes reveals matters explicitly "The economic use of the various species of palms by the colonial powers was an important reason for their inclusion in the botanical collections and winter gardens of the nineteenth century." While the scale of the Palm House was modest 109' x 46' x 46', the nature of translation and adapted use integrates a hidden history and reveals many forgotten motives that often lay behind the industrialisation of nature, these being familiarly expressed through artificial landscaping and garden-related environments.
Though Gabriela Albergaria project-works always suggest something of a gentle intervention, on closer inspection we find a distinctly subversive content is commonly exposed, "the visitor often got the impression that his country had taken possession of whole continents full of these palms…." The artificial contents of how the modern mind comprehends the natural is challenged in all her works, as is the striking feature of how these plant forms have themselves adapt to new environment and habitats of botanical colonisation. One is reminded somewhat of Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) - who is often seen as the father of modern genetics - and his famous text 'Experiments With Plant Hybridization' (1865). Thus a whole platform of associative ideas emerge from these early developments in economic exoticism. The industrialisation of nature, its artificial beginnings, creates a raft of free-floating associations. It is not my intention to suggest Albergaria implies all these avenues as explicitly intended, but like all artists the open question of form and function is inevitably brought into view. Hence the photo/drawings that are also part of the installation, and which derive from the Berlin-Dahlem Botanic Garden, are devoted to issues of plant geography. Indeed, though I mention them last, they form the key to all the other contents of the project. A key because they are primarily and deliberately artificial (an artist's drawing practising artifice) and mechanical (the camera as a recording mechanism). The Enlightenment and modern science is purportedly driven by reason, but the route as to how it is achieved is at the same time deeply embedded in artifice and nature. Gabriela Albergaria by looking closely at the desiderata of the past – the lost Palm House of the Pfaueninsel – has been able to open up a nexus of ideas that show that artifice-reason-nature far from being dissonant are all too intimately connected.
Nature or the game of code systems
Gabriela Albergaria’s work embraces such a vast signifier - “Nature” – that it becomes more than ambiguous. She brings heightened involvedness to this first approach. On addressing manipulated, planted, transported, uttered, catalogued, hierarchized, researched, experienced and recollected nature, she plays with an unstable, restless factor, a palimpsest of history and a variety of stories. History and tale doggedly depend on the word, form, that is, a chain of diverse experiences within any instance of discourse, theory or practice. Besides “discovering” nature, man “explores himself” through nature.
Gabriela Albergaria chose to address this issue quite early in her course as an artist. Born in Vale de Cambra in 1965, at the age of fourteen, she began to commute between her home town and the city of Oporto – switching from urban and cultural life to another, more intimate life in the country. Later on, following her studies at the Oporto Faculty of Fine Arts, with senior lecturers Ângelo de Sousa and Álvaro Lapa, whose erudition and profound knowledge of art and philosophy left their indelible mark, she moved to Lisbon (1989) where she remained until moving to Berlin in 2000. The parallel that exists between writing, practical philosophy and objectual creation are the paradigmatic features of her process and the groundwork to her pieces.
Albergaria explores a distinctive feeling since the 18th Century whereby man’s relationship with Nature is measured in terms of distance. This standpoint dictates that men who are submersed in nature (farmers, fishermen, the bon savage?) are completely unaware of this shifting, fluid, protean referent, which matches the Signifier. Albergaria has lived thither and hither, between nature in the country and nature in the city and literature, colonized nature, the “green patch”, the practice of gardening, which she has developed since her early childhood. Employing nature as her “material”, she has inflected its diverse expressions and how it is culturally and personally regarded.
The wide array of modalities that convey man’s encounter with nature takes on diverse forms and is somewhat like a system of codes. The title of her proposal for Centro Cultural de Belém’s project room induces this game of passage: Collect, Transportar, Coloniser (2004). Besides gathering several languages, it prompts several meanings and connotations, which reflect the outcome of the encounter and inexorable miscegenation between people, languages, species, that is, between code systems. “To collect” implies taxonomy; a grid of one’s investment in art or plants. “To transport” is the premise to the first verb; it implies a living being’s adaptation to other living conditions or the adaptation of an object to a different context. “To colonise”, the French word follows it’s English and Portuguese antecessors, is an explicit reference to Lapérouse’s expedition. It implies the history of nations and power. The artist’s impartial standpoint on adopting several languages and the implicit transnational motion that underlies these words compels viewers to evaluate all of the parts implied in the motion of extracting a being or thing from its “natural” context – of giving it a second nature. The exhibition’s title in itself suggests that observers should focus on the locations, people and objects of power, the political edifications of power, instead of words – the reality of re-adaptation and re-composition, rather than the utopian natural habitat. The strict classical side of discipline, her leaps into the past and her discovery of systems of encounter with nature sum up the radical contemporaneity of her work.
Man’s struggle against Nature is a state of mind, a historical perspective, a certain capacity to fictionalize. Nature can be a vector of instability as well as a profoundly, disturbing change; a menace to man with her fury, but also a means of arousing emotion. Nature in her undefined state of rage and calm dismembers into manifestations of the uncanny and the familiar, conformity and non-conformity. Camoens , on establishing this multiform, shifting state of Nature, integrated time and its changes (---), much like Gabriela Albergaria and her array of concerns:
The sweetest scenes will even offend in the absence of the beloved.
The beauty of these mountains, fresh as day,
The spreading shade these chestnuts green
The meadow-rivers with their gentle flow, [bestow,
Whence sadness all is banished far away;
The sea’s hoarse murmur and the landscape gay,
The setting sun that sinks the hills below,
The cattle gathered, loitering as they go,
Clouds that in air in gentle warfare play;
Nay all the charms that nature, e’en most rare,
In such variety for eye can spread,
Are anguish mere, if I behold not thee;
Without thee all are wearisome despair,
Without thee ever round me is there shed
In chiefest joys the chiefest misery.
(Camoens)
Albergaria’s work is elaborated in an extremely complex manner and is conceptually grounded on fields beyond art. The conceptual ramifications of her work are extremely stimulating because they encourage her audience to immerse into literature or the experience of nature without constantly dividing their attention.
Photography, sculpture, drawing, language, fiction
Due to its artificial light and memory, Gabriela Albergaria’s body of work in photography is entirely dedicated to the unnerving images of our gardens, our homes. I would like to begin with this first manifestation in her work, not because it is embodies a concern with time, bur rather because it is related to the schooling of her personal experience and her experience of Nature through childhood memories. To create an image today means that she returns to what she once was and how that picture has become deep-seated, the prototype of an emotion or experience. “Casa de Pássaros”, quite an unconventional birdhouse, was built by Albergaria to agglutinate the issue of housing. The house as a metaphor for the past and present, transposed into an unknown relative, a form of close alterity: the bird. She also added a mesmerizing perspective to it: the view from the top of a tree. (Roni Horn too has a series of pictures of several birds photographed from the back. They assume an unstable identity, close yet mysterious, almost like an elegant head of hair, unveiling a beautiful, sensuous form that is divested of any concrete sexual existence).
I am also referring to photography because this was when she first began to tap into sculpture. In fact, Albergaria had to build model gardens in order to take her pictures; in her own words, she “recreated them”. Rather than conform to a model, she tried to “re-create” her gardens. With these devices, she reinstates her memories and develops them, memory being her prime material. Little by little, she shifts the initial image, manipulating that space. I presume that this experience is informed by what she reads and the experiences that she has developed regarding the subject. Her pictures suggest artificial motion through space, the malleability of imagination and memory, elaborated in conjunction in order to fictionalize. They are almost guidelines for the viewer who is shrunken, like Alice in Wonderland, and left to venture in a place where reality and fiction merge: producing the spatial premises for an open-ended story to unfold. “Tenho 7 anos e o buxo dá-me pelos ombros” [I am 7 years old. The boxwood is already shoulder high] inaugurated this passage of experience – the memory of a fictional place, presented in 2000 during the Projecto Mnemosyne in Coimbra.
Albergaria began to display models with their pictures as soon as she realized that they invoked different moments to the formulation of an experimental, abstract space. The models dispose of a laboratory where a visual construct is realized within a dark, mysterious atmosphere. Here, an environment, an atmosphere is erected, in other words, a voyage through memory, brought up at a present, odd time, which is nevertheless
compelling.
I have used the word “model” because Albergaria works with small-scale model gardens. The plants and bushes are carefully placed in rows, on mounds, in beds, around trellises, hung on lines, to suggest the layout of a garden, a forest, flower beds or simply a patch of green grass. The miniatures are placed on top of tables, on the floor or onto rickety shelves. They contain small-scale landscapes, a portion of the flora that inhabits the world which generously, yet reservedly, is open to observation and endearment, sheltered within a tiny room. Often enough, they are representations of gardens in becoming, shrubbery for planting. On the other hand, false grafting is an allusion to Nature’s instability, but also a suggestion of the second nature to all things.
Stimulated by his ceaseless reflection on magic and scientific reasoning, Claude Lévi-Strauss begins his extraordinary La Pensée Sauvage (1962) by venturing into the field of the visual arts. He thinks in terms of events and structures and, to simplify things, considers that science elaborates events on the basis of structures whereas the “bricoleur” (magic reasoning) elaborates structures through events. The artist works neither way but alludes (this is one of the most important features in Gabriela Albergaria’s body of work) to both of these universes. The visual arts, according to Lévi-Strauss, elaborate and provoke aesthetic emotion because they are “reduced models” or miniatures. He undermines the most obvious counterargument by explaining that the Cistean Chapel is a reduced model of what it represents: the unbounded universe.
It seems interesting to underscore that Lévi-Strauss firstly took an interest in the issue of scale. He noted that reduction – even in monuments – is a form of greater expression; a structure that embraces what it represents. Above all else, the miniature is, first and foremost, that which is small enough to be handled, that which can be procured with the gaze, hand and body. In the case of the miniature applied to the work of art, Lévi-Stauss wraps his analysis by stating, “the intrinsic virtue of the reduced model is that it compensates for the fact that it renounces its sensible dimension in favor of an intelligible dimension” .
Far from wanting to apply Lévi-Strauss’ theory to the work of art, it seemed important to refer to the issue of intelligibility, but also to underline another concern, playfulness; this is the best way of addressing Gabriela Albergaria’s work, its moment of fruition. I have mentioned “play” in the philosophic acceptation of the word; experimenting with the aim of creating a form, a rule, of playing with knowledge without any particular purport. Models underscore the issue of handling – indispensable when creating a second nature – removing the artist’s work from the emotional and immaterial space of photography. Once this threshold has been overcome, Albergaria is free to decline the issues that she works with, the first being the rules of fruition that she creates.
But let us return to the issue of sculpture. Discovered during her passage from the model to the photographic image, sculpture has become an important concern in her work. Besides models, and for them, as was the case of the bird house, Albergaria makes use of existent objects, doubling them. “Escada”, presented at Lisbon’s Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, repositions a ladder that was copied from the ones that the foundation’s gardeners use to access out-of-reach areas. Albergaria’s ladder forges an access to higher or exterior places that plants, unlike men, reach. With this discreet, powerful presence, she rouses another way of living and another way of experiencing inhabited architecture, alerting her viewers to the body’s performativity with regards to nature, a completely different way of being and looking. These copies – it is important that they be seen as doubles – ring the ready-made bell, that is, the poetic appropriation of an existent object, placed in a space of contemplation that is freed of function but that determines functionality. Albergaria in fact shifts these objects by bringing them into the museum’s arena. The fact that we are dealing with replicas takes her work once step ahead: it establishes a concrete field of fiction. Just like Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, she doubles our world and changes the rules therein. The world that is mirrored in her work has the same objects, but new rules of physics, unstable scales and word games. With these objects, Albergaria pushes us across the threshold that divides these two dimensions.
Deep-seated, personal memory finds a collective, historic echo in works such as Collect, Transportar, Coloniser. Baskets of plants, replicas of the ones used in Lapérouse’s ultimate expedition, are reproduced in a remarkable and sensuous manner, alluding to the entire Belém area, which is marked by the discoveries and discourse/ideology that stems thereof. Following the colonial route of a plant, its passage through continents, discloses the entire collective unconscious of the power and fascination of tropical plants and their familiar presence in “our” gardens. Collect, Transportar, Coloniser acquired a potent critical condition within the CCB’s context: a controversial building that bought pandemonium to the urbanistic link between present
and past. The building was projected as if it had some sort of intrinsic quality that could somehow solve this standoff. The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, one of the Portuguese Manueline’s prime samples, was created from scratch by artists who regarded the rest of European from a side position. National priorities in fact saw the birth of issues such as cultural miscegenation and the affirmation of power, issues that had nothing to do with neighboring Italian or French developments. The Mosteiro thus marks specific power relations and manifestations of culture.
The originality of Albergaria’s sculptural methods is based on incorporating a specific kind of motion: the growth of a living being and how bodies develop in space. Verticality (namely the outdoor installation that Albergaria placed on trellises, repeating the ancient practice of nursing fragile plants) becomes a life support that is spatially determined around weight; verticality and gravity, the physical weight of a body, oppose each other. The introduction of this organic movement also affects her essentially cultural-based thoughts on mix breeding and appropriation – second nature. The growth of a tree tentatively takes place in space, with light and water, according to a law that obeys a system which adapts to the earth and its specific context. Culture is a form of second nature, but nature itself can also be architecture and drawing, depending on where you stand and how you relate to your footing.
Drawing mostly submits to this process of evaluating Nature in her work. Obeying a method that is far from naïf, a sort of cross-section, a visually complex composition that is structurally coherent, her drawings are the “natural” impulse of creative drawing. They are rigorously contained in their monochromy and line and seem to implicitly draw a pantheistic critique of Spinoza and Descartes, where man in Nature is “like an empire within an empire”. In other words, artificially disconnected from Nature, disconnected from its laws and the parallelism between spirit, mind and body or extension. Her drawings seem to demonstrate this incredible theory. They bring the register of a purely physical account of a manifestation in Nature: culture. But they also bring an almost mechanical field – drawing is recognized as a discipline of knowledge in the greatest of academic traditions – a remove, that of she who looks at herself as she draws, of she who looks at the mechanism that is her hand and observes the correspondence to her theme.
The different issues raised by Gabriela Albergaria’s work have this link in common, multifarious Nature, which thus takes on the form of models, drawing, photographs, documentation or historic contextualization. All of these expressions do not represent a hesitant range of talents, but inevitable, binding forms of expression: drawing, science, the manipulation of organic life, fiction, image. Although she sometimes seems to fall into the category of installation, Albergaria works hard at maintaining these contact zones with classical forms of visual expression such as photography, drawing and sculpture, but I would also gamble at the field of word and germination of fiction.
In Loco: the Jardim da Sereia and the CAPC
There are two essential aspects to the conception of Gabriela Albergaria’s project for the CAPC. On the one hand, an accident, a picture that she discovered by chance in a newspaper, as well as several others witnessed in forests after wind and thunderstorms. The second aspect is that the Jardim da Sereia, particularly a clearing she had in mind, had already been occupied with sculptures. This meant that it could no longer be used, for it would come into futile, unwanted conflict with the existing pieces. To counterbalance this, as in most of her drawings, the pictures that she took of this place spurred her drawings, which were subsequently invested with the vectorial representation of atmospheric motion.
Replete with history, the Santa Cruz Park or Jardim da Sereia is an ancient forest that used to belong to brothers from the Holy Cross of Coimbra. Besides the rich Botanical Gardens, whose rare, exotic specimens now inhabit the Portuguese colonies, for instance the islands of São Tomé, the garden’s foliage once offered its visitors substantial, much afforded shade. The Gulbenkian Foundation’s antique guide, the prestigious Guia de Portugal, describes the garden in the following manner: “Besides this sumptuous vestibule [Eugénio de Castro, the writer cited in the original text, referred to the park’s entrance as a ‘vestibule’], the park has a fine staircase with landings, small swells and seats decorated with tiles (…) that lead to the fountain in a hidden corner, many pleasant trails, a circular lake carefully surrounded by encircling trees, a games field (…) but the garden mostly offers rare, fragrant botany with its Laurel lanes (Laurus Indica), which were planted by Linck in the 18th Century as a means of meaningful prevention: ‘Come forth and admire Laurels from
India and Goa in all their majesty’”.
If the architectonic appearance of the garden is pretty much the same (despite its growing decay), its flora was amply remodeled after a cyclonic gust of wind destroyed almost all available species in 1941, as well as those of Sintra and the Buçaco. This small catastrophe marked an ideological turn of events. The trees went from local or Mediterranean cultures to a more fashionable culture: the tropical and subtropical specimens that still exist today.
This picturesque, local story meets up with the artist’s own personal story. Albergaria had long been haunted by the image of torn trees, toppled in the street by the sheer force of the wind. The issue of the storm, the accident, the lifeless tree and the constitution of a new habitat began to take form. Besides being an historical garden within the city’s mesh, the Jardim da Sereia is also a point of passage from the city’s top to its bottom half. It is a hybrid place with strong memories, a historical plot with an active presence.
Albergaria has conceived her exhibition at the CAPC as an interior and exterior trail with signs, effects and manifestations of a natural catastrophe, inspired on her own personal and local story. The show is divided into three parts: storm, accident, motion / change. Its title serves to expand these more descriptive concepts, ranging from French to English, and finally Portuguese: Mouvement, Instability, Conflito, I.
The exhibition comprises a piece which will be presented in the form of an “accident” outdoors. Landkunstleben marks its first version. In this previous version, she partially buried a rotten tree that had been torn down by the wind. The “accidents” that determine this tree/work’s final destiny were its illness, the wind and the artist who ultimately buried it. In very much the same way, Albergaria will place a local tree in one of the Garden’s trails, as if it had been cut down for people to pass. Besides this mise-en-scène, the tree is an intruder from the past, a specimen that once prospered in the Garden. A placard with background information on the piece shall be placed in the vicinity of the work, elucidating it.
The philosophical virtues of accidents are boundless: the accident cannot be forecast. It is a logical category (the accident can affect or modify the subject, that is, it is part of the motion of a phrase and, therefore, in a situation, it is the component of change). In other words, from the perspective of the subject who undergoes a change, the accident is the normal passing of things. Accidents mark history, time and being for man– this emotional paradox marked Camoens, who troubled to express the normalcy and strangeness of change.
Nature and life’s driving force, accident, is an essential element of landscape architecture today, where life is seen as change. Life is a system of balances and imbalances, of forces that fight and confront each other before reaching a temporary equilibrium. With this system of changes in mind, Gabriela Albergaria began to make drawings of a clearing that could no longer be occupied. Her “exercises in motion”, in her own words, insert atmospheric movement into the weather of her drawings. Loose, with units of colour that confront each other, her drawings refer to outdoor spaces in a fantastical way.
There is a substantial change in these drawings that conquers all other forms of expression in this exhibition. If movement, motion had already insinuated itself in an organic, temporally delayed suggestion in her work, it becomes quite clear with this newfound, almost parasitical presence. Her classical, contained drawing is freed, becoming invaded by abstract movements (motion is always a form of abstraction, a scheme, a way of jointly tracing space and time). This is the exhibition’s vector: catastrophe, abstraction, change in an established order.
Her photographs prolong this fictitious investment in the clearing that is portrayed in her drawings. Once again, Albergaria introduces an almost abstract motion into the heart of an arranged, structured landscape. Like the register of an event, she does not take pictures of the accident, but the inherent wonder and admiration of nature’s force as its affects the world we know. The habitual staged feeling that her photos inspire is replaced with the mise-en-scène of change’s absurdity, the altered landscape, accident. Her pictures continue to inspire a sense of artificiality that enables the observer to attain a sense of remove and analyze what is being observed, but this time round, she moves one step ahead in this fictional suggestion of a space that can be explored by the mind and memory of the body, with imminent destruction at bay. Without any definite cause, this is the destruction of the space of memory, which leads to a place where all mystery is solved.
Another even more enigmatic intervention takes place outside which literally inverts past and present: by polishing one of the marble pieces to the staircase, Gabriela Albergaria transports us to the time of Linck’s bucolic impressions. The garden was like this. Now, it is mirrored in the polished marble. In a flash,
by applying this technique, this space and its sculptures have been recovered. The Jardim da Sereia has several layers of periods (numerous accidents) hidden beneath its surface: the local trees, the brother’s sports fields, its “French” decor, tropical flora, the decaying ornaments, sculptures of an exceptional artist from the nineties, Rui Chafes, and Gabriela’s intervention today. There is one difference: hers may be the last accident, but it is a simulated, conscious one.
In the wake of tsunami, hurricanes, and the recent forest fires of Spain and Portugal, one might think that there is some sort of element-like vendetta taking place against the terrestrial world and human habitation. The forces of water, fire and wind (air) have seemingly conjoined against their sister earth. And, though it may be superstitious to suppose it so, there still remains in the human mind a deep psychical affinity with what were once seen as the primary elements of our world. When speaking of fire, something particularly relevant and coincidental to Portugal’s experiences of the summer, Gaston Bachelard the French philosopher once wrote (in dualistic fashion) of its paradoxical mental contents:
“It rises from the depth of the substance and offers itself with the warmth of love. Or it can go back down into the substance and hide there, latent and pent up, like hate and vengeance. Among all phenomena, it is the only one to which there can be so definitely attributed the opposing values of good and evil. It shines in Paradise. It burns in Hell. It is gentleness and torture. It is cookery and apocalypse.”
In contrast what the Portuguese artist Gabriela Albergaria’s work supposes is a type of human poetics that supports a form of natural reparation. Indeed, her art projects may be seen and read as driven by the processes of intervention and reparation. Thus in a sense her artistic interventions generally deal with what might be called consequences, accumulations, and the aftermath of natural effects. But in contradistinction to the entropy and transformation principle that informs say the work of an artist like Anya Gallaccio, the works of Albergaria are yet more minimal and metaphoric in contents. There is a subtle quietness to all the projects that the artist undertakes, and there is usually no abject or entropic object that marks the outcome of the experiment undertaken.
Also, the word ‘experiment’ is a telling usage, since it points directly to the utilisation of grafting, transplanting, colonising or re-colonising inherent to many of Albergaria’s projects. And, it is the interface of nature as garden, both in terms of landscape architecture, the history of gardens, and the horticultural regenerative entity, that the artist expresses her ideas. In Albergaria’s recent project Collect, transplantar, coloniser (2004-5) for the Centro Cultural de Bélem, she developed (as is common to her practice) a site specific project incorporating a local dead elm tree. Working with tree surgeons (collaboration is an essential part of her work) she lopped its branches for the purposes of an interpretive reassembly. Installed within the gallery space with elements alluding to grafting and reconfiguration, it brought what was formerly outside (the tree was due to be felled in any event) inside. The metaphoric content being the transposition of that which was dead to a newly regenerated poetic life, something that is better described as an act of aesthetic reparation.
What we take to be indigenous is largely migratory, and this marked a second aspect of the Albergaria installation. Assembled on pallets in the entrance to the gallery space were plant species that had improperly propagated themselves to different areas of the nearby tropical garden. The profligate and hybrid nature of plants that are humanly adapted through grafting and horticultural propagation, or simply adapt themselves to new environments, was what was being highlighted in this instance. Albergaria has a huge fascination with the history of gardening, with botany, and the horticultural paradigm of adaptation. She has travelled extensively and her fascination stems from the early Renaissance garden to the great landscape gardeners of the eighteenth century. The general ignorance most people have about plant life, what they take to be natural and indigenous, when in fact they are imported and transplanted, opens up a vast array of issues that are not merely botanical but social, cultural, and political. This brings an added meaning to the term ‘to colonise’, it doubles the colonisation that is taking and continues to take place, and furthers the notion of reparation to include issues that are both social and political. Portugal as a former colonising power was thus given a mirror of itself, a self-reflexive accounting as to what is actually Portuguese or truly indigenous in the post-colonial environments it has created. What was truly European Portuguese, and what was a bi-product of its imperial history, grafted on (as it were) through the extensive role these plants had played in its long colonising period. While it is true that plants carry no passport, are frequently adapted and hybridised, the installation carried forward a whole series of questions as to origins and ethnicity that Albergaria wished to expose.
The role of intervention and adaptation was similarly illustrated by the construction of portal or gate (perhaps, even a greenhouse door) serving both as a point of transition, and which might also be read as the metaphoric incubator of these tropical translations. In this respect Gabriela Albergaria worked closely with the botanists and propagators of the nearby tropical plant nursery. And, if the tree, door and plant installations suggested reparation and differing forms of redress, the inclusion of the basket weave plant holders used to transport plants made from what is called African mahogany mitigated the sense of post-colonial hybridity that is the hidden common currency of our modern world.
The Bélem project was closely related to the Calouste Gulbenkian Gallery Garden project a year earlier, though with the distinction that the Bélem concentrated on issues of plants, garden, transposition and translation, and on the social and cultural relativism that they implied. By contrast the Gulbenkian project focused more directly on landscape archaeology, issues of proximity and the task of performance, that is to say what we might call the performance contents of nature and the artist’s personal involvement within understanding its natural processes. The important involvement of artist-based participation and task-making, whether through intervention, or reparation, are vitally important to Albergaria. In consequence at the Gulbenkian the artist dug a trench running from a hundred year old eucalyptus tree near the temporary exhibition gallery, shored it up and exposed the roots of the tree by scrupulously removing the soil. Hence the landscape archaeology and historical meaning were exposed, and this heightened the awareness of the relationship between the gallery building and the garden/park that surrounded it. The performance content for the artist was the personal experiences and the documented processes of that discovery. As a subtle intervention it thus brought to light the layering of garden history and the frequently arbitrary construction of architecture, something often ignored or unconsidered, and which stemmed from Albergaria’s own researches into the complex development of famous gardens and their subsequent histories.
The Gulbenkian project also included something which the artist called disguise/performance in the garden, where a series of concrete slates with wooden strip facia were placed on the lawn, covered in sand with a highly porous consistency, and with thermal wrap. Covering this was a rich organic soil on which Albergaria planted prairie grass. A grass later used to refurbish other areas of the garden/park. In purely optical terms what was seen was a series of low level platforms, the grass growing to cover them during the period of the exhibition. The effect was to heighten a sense of nature’s own working processes, what might best be described as a natural phenomenon seen as organic performance. And, it was this ‘natural performance’ that served as the inspiration for the installations within the gallery itself. Placed on raised table were inspirational models derived from the garden and park flora outside. This had the effect of bringing the outside/inside, reintegrating and reinforcing the relations between the gallery and the garden. Since the word ‘reparation’ means quite literally “repair: supply of what is wasted: amends: compensation,” the act of redress was made present and substantive, something further emphasised by the inclusion of a ladder from the lower level of the gallery, and formalising the interconnectivity between the gallery and the garden.
I want to stress again the grafting, unifying, and metaphoric transpositions, implicit to the work of this artist. For the same tendency being evident in two other projects that took place at Schloss Wiepersdorf (2004), under the rubric of an exhibition called ZELT, and the Landkunstleben project at Steinhöfel in the same year. At Schloss Wiepersdorf the project followed the form of a project-experiment involving the setting up of a base camp in the grounds, in which a group of artists developed films, installations and presentations. Albergaria’s work consisted of studies in synchronisation using tree branches to deal with issues of movement and stasis. Two branches of an old oak tree were connected as if by graft creating a visual swing immediately subject to the movement of the wind. While it hinted in a symbolic sense of cross-fertilisation, something that was echoed in the artist group operating from a base camp, it also illustrated a reference to film (i.e., the movement image) in that each artist was asked to think of a film that had inspired them. In Albergaria’s case it was the Jean Renoir’s film Une partie de campagne, it which a older woman on a swing was used in homage to a painting by Renoir’s earlier namesake Auguste (no doubt the true origin of the motif, however, being Fragonard’s famous eighteenth century painting ‘Girl on a Swing’). The visual context was deliberately fêtes gallantes via Manet’s Dejeuner….. Conversely, the artist also used tent pegs and ropes to fix two other branches in arrested movement thus creating a sense of the static image. This in retrospect now appears a type of post-Deleuzean positioning whereby the movement-image was deliberately contrasted to the arrested movement. In reality this highlighted the distinction between what was time-based
and what was spatially formulated. There is a human feeling commonly experienced in Nature’s settings of being simultaneously inside (seasonal) and outside (perennial) time.
The minimal character of such interventions by Albergaria has already been stated, and again it was used in the artist’s Landkunstleben project, where an orchard setting was utilised to create acts of reparation and grafting. Hence old apples tree were propped in order to stop them falling over (a conventional country practice), and two branches were tied together as if symbolically grafted. In a certain respect this intervention suggested something of an assisted ready made, since the artist merely extended and made metaphoric what was the normal practice of fruit tree propagation. At the same time an old dead apple tree that had fallen across a path was segmented and partially buried hinting at another aspect of orchard practice, namely the regular pruning of fruit trees, the severe cutting back made at the end of the fruiting season.
The temporary status and ephemeral remit of the land-based project works might appear to stand in contrast to the living record of Albergaria’s drawings, and the photographs of nature-based model settings she has used for several years. However, it would be a serious error to segregate them as if they were totally separate or autonomous pieces of work. For everything that Albergaria generates comes as a whole, and her drawings are no more than an extension of the living environments she has experienced. Created in green coloured pencil on paper, with layer after layer of hatching and cross-hatching, they are like a material embodiment of the landscape and woodland motifs she has chosen to represent. Assembled frequently in the form of diptychs, triptychs, and panorama, the drawings are not intended to be an exact record (something achieved more easily by a photograph), but an exemplary embodiment of nature as it is experienced. Indeed, in many respects they remind one of the rich pseudo-fantastical landscapes of eighteenth century artists such as Salvatore Rosa or the proto-Romantic Alexander Cozens, as much as anything else. Almost classical in their composition the drawings have all the characteristics of the classical Claude-like repoussoir, allied to the high and low viewpoints resonant of Romantic landscapes. Hence the artist has been able in these drawings to fuse together the thing seen (the object of study) with the thing felt and responded to (the subjective and psychological). In quite another sense she has attempted to realise an aesthetic reparation, the dichotomy that often operates between the feeling and seeing experiences of nature as landscape.
The photographs of natural but modelled environments are both document and art work. For several years Albergaria has been making natural landscape installations and photographing them. Not unlike some of the settings of the works of Gregory Crewdson, though without any of the Gothic or Hitchcock-ian overtones, they embody a sort of dreamscape that is both natural and real on the one-hand, and fictionally fantasised on the other. Usually executed as Lambda prints they create a feeling of sombre nature more reminiscent of a film set than of the actual world. One is reminded, perhaps, of the Tolkienesque world of Fangorn Forest, rather than the haunted settings of Crewdson which seem indebted to an updated Edgar Allen Poe. It is noticeable, and has been so throughout her work, that Albergaria never introduces fauna or visual human aspects into her engagement with nature and the landscape environment. Whether this is to avoid the implications of narrative that might ensue, or simply to give priority to the natural world on which all forms of life depend is hard to say. Neither is it evident that she is interested in the traumatic events that nature is able to generate, the devastation whence I began this essay. In that sense Albergaria owes little to what is often called the Romantic-Sublime. We might seek to understand her position better, therefore, through the conventions of garden history, since so much of what Europeans understand to be the natural has been created through thousands of years of human intervention within the landscape. And, this position is markedly distinct from what the Victorians were wont to call “nature tooth and claw.”
The utilisation of grafting, the metaphoric scion, and the use of propagation all suggest human betterment, an Enlightenment amelioration or improvement of the natural environment. Though it may not always work out the intention is in principle evolutionary, a moving towards something better. In this respect Albergaria mirrors no more than an increasing interest in returning to a direct organic engagement with nature, a move away from the bio-chemical determinism that has dominated the European landscape through farming and husbandry over the last fifty years. As Deleuze has observed the horticultural model is more pluriform, more various, and self-sustaining. What this requires, however, is a greater awareness of the complex working mechanisms of the natural world, something now extremely remote from the everyday understanding of our increasingly urbanised world.
In her recent work, called simply Árvore (2005) executed in Oporto, the connection is made explicit. In this instance a branch has been lopped and propped on a metal trestle, on which other sub-branches or tree limbs
have bolted together and symbolically fused together the natural and the industrial. A small red tape grafting has also been deliberately alluded to, the whole creating a sense of sculptural precariousness. The notion of disequilibrium implied by the work may say much as to how the artist has come to see today’s alienated engagement with nature. However, what is most interesting is that the artist achieves this sense of alienated self-awareness through the most minimal of means. Albergaria’s works are never didactic, one never feels one is being instructed or preached at as to the ongoing damage we are doing to our natural environment. It is the ability to create in a deft manner the sense of a personal self-reflexivity that is required and where her works excel. People are not forced to listen but made to think. The recent devastations, and the arguments about climate change, are thus given extra force when we are compelled to consider what this artist highlights, and we are similarly bound to recognise in nature what Bachelard calls “the opposing values of good and evil.”