ORIENTATION AS GARDENING

How can one understand orientation in the 21st century? ORIENTATION AS GARDENING considers the term of orientation more as a transformative process than as a fixed construct. As essential common ground of its manifold elements, the project carries out a questioning of dualistic paradigms as they have been developed by, above all, the history of western insight. Recently however, western academia has been developing multifaceted approaches for alternative subject constellations, sustainable compositional systems, which primarily understand sustainability as an ethical concept. ORIENTATION AS GARDENING joins this endeavor for the generation of knowledge plus self-examination. The Assemblage Board, developed in the project, with its zones and experimental appendages offers to be a central instrument that demonstrates our collected and developed models and efforts of thought. It translates, while also orienting itself upon, the ideas of the systems of composition, their spatial mediation and demands into a now. The Board is an abstract garden, in which garden is seen in an extended sense from human systems of composition. It links the basic Asian concept of mutual relativity and gradual space-designation of actions with contemporary performative and architectural practices. The Assemblage Board a garden, a stage, a storage will be set up and operate location-dependently in Vienna, London, and Tokyo respectively in the public space in front of the cooperative institutes, that are shaped and imprinted by the surrounding cityscape and/or park with its local residents and its intrinsic conditions and realities including its actants. ORIENTATION AS GARDENING is an intercultural, philosophical, artistically defined project. With an extended term of experience, orienting itself methodically along a phenomenology of experience, occidental-western subject understanding is supposed to be modified, especially in its regard to its categorical self-understanding. Asian thought has elaborated fundamental philosophies of experience; these approaches are confronted with contemporary phenomenological theories such as Post Humanism, Vital Materialism, Plant Thinking or rather Object Oriented Ontology. The concept of materiality is here no longer understood as that which stands counter to the subject. We side this intercultural reading with three applied historical systems of composition: The Sakuteiki, a Japanese gardening manual from the 11th century, The Garden of Epicurus from the 3rd century BC, and the art-philosophy of Chinese painter Shitao from the 17th century. Gardening as used in the title of the project indicates an active shaping of these experience connections rather than an actual garden in the literal sense. We see our Project ORIENTATION AS GARDENING as a figure of difficult empowerment potentials that links trans-historical, intercultural and artistic entanglements which in addition take place on different levels in an unprecedented way; equaling a crisscross connection, an orientation-matrix.

Who am I in relation to what surrounds me? The aim of the intercultural two-year arts-based research is the investigation of the term "orientation" as a sustainable, configurative activity (gardening) with artistic means. In questioning the dichotomy of subject and object Orientation as Gardening tries to leave an anthropocentric perspective. The research was based on three historical composition systems: the Sakuteiki, a Japanese garden manual from the 11th century, the art-philosophy of the Chinese painter Shitao (17th c.) and the garden school of Epicurus (300 BC). On different levels they have been decisive for the realization. Taking "orienting" literary facing to the East an initial and shaping aspect put the focus on Japan: The artistic strategy of the "Eight Views", which, originated in Chinese painting and imported to Japan, describes a landscape in eight different perspectives eight out of an infinite number of possible views. Based on this structural principle, eight "Assemblage Boards" have been developed inspired by Japanese shohin shelves for bonsai and stones and enlarged on a human scale that became the vantage point of a different view onto the world. As an exploratory tool and investigational object at once, the Assemblage Boards served as a stage, frame, and platform, as well as sculptures. Each of them has been edited and adapted to the public space of Tokyo, London, and Vienna, where they have been presented in the course of the project. In their adoption and modification according to the three different venues the boards themselves became subjects, following their own stories condensed in the titles of the individual boards on site. Transformed into independent entities that respond to their environment, they could change and thus evoke a change in the view of the audience. While a non-anthropocentric view was rather easily accessible in Japan (because it is deeply rooted in the Buddhist and Shintoist tradition), a transfer of this experience became more strenuous in the dense urban area of King's Cross in London. In order to uncover and connect to the severe historical and social layers of the development area, where the cooperation partner Central St Martins University of Arts is situated, a comprehensive research was essential. Here the boards began to disappear, became unattainable or changed the medium. In the third part of the project in Vienna the eight Assemblage Boards engaged in dialogue with eight artistic positions from Japan, Great Britain, Singapore and Austria, that share the focus on orientation and cultivation, care and relationship, autonomy and dependency on how we can locate ourselves sustainably in our co-world. Each part of the project has been accompanied by performances, walks, talks, guided tours and lectures. The project was realized in cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Youkobo Art Space, Tokyo and the Central St Martins University of Arts, London, and is accompanied by two publications. Supported by Austrian Cultural Forum, Tokyo and Austrian Cultural Forum, London www.orientationasgardening.net