The Gardens of Deviation

Abstract

The mechanisms of satisfying desires have made modern urban complexes extremely fixed and programmed leaving no room for the ‘other’ to happen,the divergent from normative and expected behaviors to emerge. The green spaces, although a great chance to dilute this rigidness, follow the same expected patterns failing to satisfy the various emergent subjectivities that seek to constantly become ‘someone else’. This project was triggered by the need for a different kind of green places, part of an “otherness” of a city. Places that could offer something out-of-the-way, as much designed as random, that could act as counter-stories to the ordinary rhythms and norms of the urbanity.

Three new gardens are popping up in the midst of Rotterdam city center, at points, like in acupunctural treatment of the body. All designed in areas with unique characters, they seek to create new affective relationships between the citizens and their quotidian environment through the ‘reading’ of the ordinary as well as the infusion of the paradoxical landscapes of fictional settings. They are chances where you can get lost, or stumble, or even get wet; where you can climb stairs that may fall or scaffoldings that make weird noises; where you can jump above water and walk on narrow surfaces trying to keep your balance.
The gardens of deviation are there to oppose the homogeneity and striation of urbanity.

They constitute ‘leakages’ in the expectedness of current experiences in the urban realm: they are places that trigger peoples’ mind and stir emotions. Emerging in empty of meaning spaces of the urban tissue, they coexist with the ordinary and through their thresholds they filter it, making the virtualities of the existing places actual.