Exercises in Style

29.10.2021

Landscapes are complex phenomena. Their image is created by a whole range of factors that exist in a complex mutual dependence. For this reason, they are always disorganized in terms of space and time, and the way they appear is often hard to capture, since they constantly shy away from any distinctiveness. This confusion is intensified by the fact that they are constantly changing, as are views of them, since they are the object of scrutiny from a range of special-interest viewpoints. To understand them better, in the cognitive and creative process, we study and display them in layers. Aware that in the landscape the layers are inseparable, we are no less interested in their visual, artistic side than in their geological layer, pedological characteristics, vegetation, hydrology, ecology, symbolism, use of soil, ownership, political determinants and so forth. In Exercises in Style, students of landscape architecture have devoted themselves to the visual side, separated out from the complexities of problems that they would otherwise face in landscape planning. Exercises in Style are exercises in researching design, creativity training, which, in addition to knowledge, will be the one thing that will help in responding to the key challenges of the future.

Students look at the collected selected parts of plants as at the building blocks of some imaginary landscape; through and from them they articulate singular imaginary topographies with a diversity of messages and poetics that they arrive at by seeking an appropriate expressiveness and by playing a variety of possibilities off against each other. In this, they are constantly exploring and considering spatial relations, materiality, and the expressiveness of the created world. The Exercises in Style enables them to explore and use various structural and artistic idioms within the design language of landscape architecture and beyond it. Here the parts of plants lose their direct materiality, and they are also deprived of any symbolic connotation that they might tend to have. Through this process, assemblages become models of not entirely conceived spatial dynamics, just a hint of a landscape, the bare potentials of some possible spatial configuration.

Production: Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana

Mentors: Prof. Dr Ana Kučan, Assistant Nejc Florjanc

Curator of Mala Galerija Banke Slovenije: Vladimir Vidmar

The Exercises in Style were exhibited in MGBS from June 30 to August 28, 2021.