Paper short abstract:

The potted landscapes exhibited emerge from the sympathy between different things and organims as they grow. They try to challenge the way we undertsand and represent the urban patterns derived from the forces of urbanization related to tourism in the 'Costa Blanca', in Mediterranean Spain.

Paper long abstract:

The name 'potted landscapes' is a reference to the series of models Kimura Tosen made in 1847 that represented the famous 53 stations of the Tokaido route in Japan. These ones emerged from a small architectural project we did as architects. At the beginning there was an uninteresting stone wall that needed reinforcement. We started a long process of experimentation, of studying the edges of its stones, of working along the joints, again and again, in each pass, a bit more rigid: cardboard, tape, foam, iron. Unable to come inside the wall, we take other stones, and literally weave them, we study the ivy, we draw the plants that grow inside a brick wall and break it, the braided ropes that give friction for a beam to be plastered. We are kept outside, but we don't feel outside any more. The weaved reinforcement takes shape in between, we bring it and ourselves together in a transdimensional material abstraction. The clients considered it done, but the material experience goes on. We are drawing now, we keep growing plants, watering them, weaving their roots, following their growing in water, in soil, without water, in sand, we build structures for them. The stone wall started a process of inquiry that has opened for us a new way of knowing and representing patterns of growth that goes further that small scale. Now we are experimenting with stones, plants and different materials from several spots in the coast, we model small worlds with them and draw fictions of possibles lives from them.