The emotional separation of human beings from the environment and nature, especially when an increasing number of people live in cities and in urban and technological environments, is called Extinction of Experience by the scientific world.
It is an emotional deficiency which hinders or directly prevents us from counteracting the far-reaching policies and decisions that drive environmental degradation.
Given the lack of green spaces, the incorporation of nature in cities is a trend that many cities worldwide are embracing. Such trend is transforming urban planning, proposing that green areas cease to be scattered points and form a pattern that connects the entire urban space, recovering places for people and letting nature enter and become part of the city.
Artist Jose Ramón Ais and Mª Salas Mendoza Muro, founder of Nomad Garden, are taking part in this action.
Description:
José Ramón Ais will discuss his El ladrón de miel project, which is part of the “Arbolado para calles, imperios y paraísos” series, prototypes of tree alignments which create a dialogue between trees and the urban context. El ladrón de miel conveys the conceptual design of a classical garden based on mythological tales to an urban tree alignment. It comprises ash (fraxinus ornus), cypress (cupresus sempervires), linden (tilia cordata), fig (ficus carica), orange tree (Citrus x sinensis) and apple tree (malus floribunda).
The title refers to Theocritus' bucolic verses in which Eros is stung by bees while trying to steal their honey. The alignment focuses on desire and love as an instinct for life, tracing a place for the encounter of the species which make up the city's ecosystem. It comprises melliferous plants, which produce honey in symbiosis with bees. Due to their many uses, these trees have played a main role in the evolution of civilisations right up to contemporary cities. The alignment is a seduction device where the scent of flowering blooms appeals to the city as an organism, questioning the imbalances of a utilitarian and functional relationship, and wondering about possible mutualisms between trees and urban space, where we are not mere “honey thieves”.
Mª Salas Mendoza Muro will discuss the Kleos Guiniguada project.
The Guiniguada Ravine, former border between the Guanartemates from Telde and Gáldar, and origin of the settlement of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, continues to connect today the sea and the mountains, the city and the territory, spaces of consumption and productive spaces, anthropic and geological times, endemic and exotic species, likewise human and non-human.
From this perspective, Guiniguada does not seem to be a convenient and coherent bourgeois park, but rather a heterogeneous collage of overlapping landscapes, a conflicting residue of natural and productive processes that are neither integrated nor resolved. Precisely here lies both its authenticity and the opportunity to verbalise new complicities among its multiple and fragmentary realities.
With this inquisitiveness, professionals from the fields of architecture, art, history, environment, biology, engineering, computer science, music, gastronomy and perfumery have worked side by side for 18 months rediscovering and recomposing some of the geological, biological and cultural singularities that have been shaping the ravine over time.
