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Land making |
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I want to make lands. I want to propose and design lands in such a way that our sincere negotiation with them replenishes our fresh instincts upon them. I want to pursue unity of life from diversity of lands and of senses they provoke. Let us make a land so as to live it. Let us write a land so as to make it. Let us live a land ---- so as not to make it an object or a mere symbol that represents life ---- because a land is about life. I would like to dedicate this website to the fori of collaborations among those who aspire to make our lands rich in stories and sensations about life, about unity of life. Can we make a land just like a composer makes and lives music? What is the art of land making in essence? |
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Art of Time I compare land making with music composition. A composer composes audible and non-audible sonic energies into a meaningful body, which is no longer a noise. She then inserts it into a flow of time, that is, the life of herself, of interpreters (players) and of audience, where she challenges its meaning and value as a work of art. If it produces vibration, it causes us to move. If not, it is a dead work of art. In land making, a land architect composes life and material energies --- such as the sun, wind, water, land forms, soils and plants --- into a meaningful body, that is no longer a chaos. He then inserts it into a flow of time, that is, the time of his life, of human life and of environment. Land making is thus an art of time about life in relation to land and environment that entirely embrace it. If it produces vibration, resonance and congruence, it makes us move. If not, it is a dead work of art about time. |
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Art of improvisation It is then destined to continually shift over time: as the sun rotates, ice melts and plants grow and die and be decomposed as well as all human interventions give modifications such as filling the land, digging holes, shedding water, pruning the overgrown twigs of plants. The meaningful body initially composed must accept different rhythms, or pulses, of all that contribute to the composition. Land making is thus an improvisation in collaboration with life and material forms granted to us. The essence of improvisation is pulse, as in the case of music like jazz. Pulse is a beating (of heart) as the Latin pulsus already meant so. It is not to measure in the first place as in the case of tempo; but it is to feel and to receive. Land making is receptive: it has to feel with heart different beatings of life and material forms in respect to each of them. It is flexible: it has to shift over time. It is accommodating: it sets an open stage where each participant takes part in with what it can bring into in relation to others' contribution. |
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Art of place or genius loci Land making starts from the belief that each land has spiritual potentials or what is called genius loci. What story has this land told? What could it tell in the future? It requires our imagination in believing in such potentials in order for a land to manifest them. Our task is to listen to it, carefully and open-mindedly. According to a Zuni Native American mythology, the location of the Zuni pueblo where the Zuni live today was initially marked by a humongous spider touching/resting its chest to the ground after a long period of quest for an ideal land throughout the American continent. The land in reality is a hilly terrain modestly surrounded by an alluvial plain along the Zuni River where it comes out of the canyon and deposits fertile organic soils. The land is supervised by the sacred Corn Mountain (Dowa Yalanne), a butte, a remnant of a relatively less erosive mass of the bedrock. In this whole story I find wisdom of a people who listened to and answered to the genius loci negotiating with the land and handing down the story over the generations in the form of a tribal mythology. In land making, I would like to remember of the Zuni wisdom. A Czech guitarist and composer, Stepan Rak, when he came to the town of Sermoneta, south of Rome, for his performance, immediately started composing a piece about this medieval town as he was deeply moved by its spirit. This was for him a spontaneous negotiation with the land. His readiness is striking to me. Maestro Rak, not coincidentally, has two CDs titled "Terra Australis I, II" in which he plays his own compositions inspired by the genius loci of the Australian land. |
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Genius loci means 'spirit of place' or 'sense
of place', an ancient term, re-acknowledged by Christian Norberg-Schulz,
Genius Loci. Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. London,
1980. The term is also referred to by the 1975 edition of John D.
Hunt and Peter Willis, The Genius of the Place.
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Art of demarcation I believe it is essential that a piece of music (a meaningful body composed) should have beginning and ending, i.e. demarcated in time of eternity. I would not deny of eternal music without demarcation. However, it seems to me what we could do with music is to compose a piece and to challenge its relationship with the eternal music, if any. It is a condition for composing a meaningful body out of chaotic sonic energies that the body should have a point of departure and of return, that is to have demarcation. There is another provocation. When I was studying at a university in Tokyo, I encountered a maestro of Hitsuzendo or Zen Calligraphy, Maestro Terayama Tanchu. One of many tacit messages I received from him is of calligraphy that is a trace of the passage of a certain period of time during which ink, brush and paper encounter for an occasion by the mind's control. One can visualize this by the following operation: Hold with both hands two ends of a sewing string soaked in the ink so that it warps down above the paper. Slowly bring the hands parallel down to the paper until the warped string touches and lends a portion of its length directly on the paper. Lift the string slowly.... The result is a black line, with or without beginning, with or without ending. Maestro Terayama's calligraphy inscribed in me such an image. It is a trace of ink (boku-seki) left by a manifested qi energy that is running from eternity to eternity. From the point of view of the paper, the string (qi energy) is eternal. But the resulting line (calligraphy) surely has beginning and ending, or demarcated, as manifested by a line of ink. Land making embodies something similar. It is to ask the relationship of a land to the embracing whole in time and space. That relationship, however, becomes relevant only if it has spatial and phenomenal demarcation but not at the sacrifice of deleting all the traces that could suggest the continuation to the eternity. It is something like what Maestro Terayama said in the case of Zen calligraphy: "The result is a black line, with or without beginning, with or without ending." We can refer to the often-cited etymology of the words garden and horti-. The former comes from a Frank word gardo meaning 'closed place'. The latter is from Latin hortu (later to become in Italian orto) meaning 'a piece of land usually closed with bordering fence and planted with edible plants'. A human enterprise called land making (or here, garden making) has long strived to demarcate our territory. Land making will not, however, involve only spatial and phenomenal demarcation. To live a land, one needs time to let grow plants, to cultivate, to catch animals, to dig, to shed water.... and to sit down, that is, to work. Making a meaningful body of a land should take time, each time with beginning of work and ending of work. This working aspect is expressed in the Japanese word 'niwa' meaning garden. Two of many meanings it carries, besides a normal sense of garden, are "a place where to do things" and "a vacant lot within a residential territory to carry out agriculture-related tasks (such as thrashing and hulling)". Similarly, we find in the Latin word forum or in Italian foro the essence of work in land making in space and time. A forum is a place enclosed by walls, fences and columns in which works and activities, usually of politics and commerce, take place. In all these cases, a land is made significant by enclosure, demarcation and all the taking-place within. |
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"You have to think what relationship you are constructing with what you are doing and where it is situated within the context of the history, geography and actuality of the greater world." - a man who I met while traveling
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Art of entrusting Land making never completes. How many great lands were abandoned, forgotten, rediscovered? In all our land makings the degree to which we know what the land will take on in the future is limited. Land making is a precarious activity. The balance of the man's interventions (as is commonly called maintenance) and the processes of the unknown is to be only experimented in the course of a project. But at the end, there is no land making without entrusting its present as well as its future to those care-takers of the land: those decomposers, those new seeds that arrive and sprout, those lightnings that axe down branches of pear trees, those humans that work with it not knowing (or knowing) of the intentions that preceded. Land is borrowed for us to live so it is to be returned with confidence, not with regret, to be entrusted to the successors. But what should we have trust in? In processes. We can be quite optimistic if we believe that what we do in the name of land making is to take part in the processes. |
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Art of connecting Land making is a constant search for connectivity across lives, matters and things --- natural, unnatural, spiritual and corporeal --- around our territories and projection of its wonderful new meanings in living poetry. Swiss landscape architect, Paolo Bürgi, is a master of this. His eyes are searching connectivity out of otherwise, to dull eyes, scattered pieces of matters in our environment. In fact, lives, things and matters are all dull in our environment unless we come to know how to appreciate their connectivity. However, the task of land making is not to know the web of lives and matters. It is to reinvent new connectivity. New connectivity is often discovered and revealed to our senses through disjoining of our common senses by way of design in collaboration with unknown processes. It is something to be described as 'click of senses'. When there is no sense of 'click' there is no wonder in art, there is no new, rejuvenating connectivity. Such must be bad design. Good design in land making must run memories in multiple dimensions in multiple time scales, connecting here and there scattered elements that constitute our environment and gathering them to the land in issue, in order to reinvent a new life form.
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O you built a town on the hill with the wind from the sea, with the water from the higher land, with the stone from the greater earth |
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