B & B

Our first opinion of the American landscape was conditioned by our European upbringing. The urban setting, the landscape, and the Botanical Garden seemed to be "loose", in a developmental stage looking toward the future. The emergence of ecological and land-oriented concerns reinforced the idea of an unrealized potential. In Europe, landscapes are usually "licked clean" and the notion of a common patrimony often freezes them in a configuration.In comparison, the Botanical Garden seemed more like a forest. It was our great luck that we could interpose ourselves in a space and a program offering an open-mindedness so rarely found in Europe.

Our artistic involvement could express itself fully, not as a lesson but as a proposition. We are devoted neither solely to art or to landscape: without excluding one or the other, we are raising in an ecological way - a scientific, ethical and sociological way - the question of inter-human relations and how they, in turn, relate to a chosen site. The piece is seen in different ways according to whether you penetrate it or walk around it.

Everything is in opposition: the shadows and lights, the plants, and the slopes. From there, from "that," images are born. They fly out in a more or less furtive state and bang into each other in the rhythm of the arrangements that canalize -- suggesting the fluid and crawling animality of the stream, of a serpent The Stream Path.

Is it a sculpture? Not really. It comes from the materialization of a process and it will transform itself through decay, the growth of plants, the cresting of the stream and the natural order of things imposed through the annual cycles. It will also evolve and melt progressively into the landscape according to the desires of those who take care of it and the diversions of those who visit it.

1998