Landscapes are complex phenomena. Their image is created by a whole range of factors that work in a complex mutual dependence. For this reason, landscapes are always disorganised 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 landscapes are constantly changing, as ways of their perception, since they are the object of scrutiny from a range of special-interest viewpoints. In order to understand them better, in the cognitive and creative process we decompose them in layers. Aware that the layers are clumped together and inseparable in the landscape, we are no less interested in its visual, artistic side than in its 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 and design. 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.
The students look at the collected and 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 students 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, some kind of rather elusive ideas of landscapes, the bare potentials of some possible spatial phenomena.
Exhibitors: Ana Pilko, Živa Gostinčar, Ria Ileršič, Sara Plankar Hraščan, Petja Križmančič, Diana Kocijančič, Katarina Poklukar, Julija Ferenc, Katja Založnik, Tina Goričan, Nina Gerbec, Katja Štolfa, Anja Žaucer
Production: Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana
Mentors: Prof. Dr. Ana Kučan, Assistant Nejc Florjanc
MGBS Curator: Vladimir Vidmar
