Live Matter – Design vegetal

April 12 – May 21, 2016

LECTURE

April 11, 2016
Inaugural lecture by Rosetta Sarah Elkin
Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA

The installation Live Matter concerns itself with the ongoing measure of the natural world – how plant life has been described, muted, and labeled throughout botanical history – to reveal a new discourse that delights in an attitude of discovery, one that acknowledges the aliveness of plants.

The research of Rosetta S. Elkin calls out plants as a design medium, a proposition that acknowledges that we remain in a period of discovery when it comes to transformations of the plant itself. The subject of live matter is, in a sense, about how we participate in the universal act of planting. Therefore, the term is suggested to invoke the animated but rarely fully appreciated existence of plant life. Plants displace, conjoin, sequence; they are irritable, sensitive, or combative and display a range of postures including anticipation and mobility.

Landscape architecture is a discipline of borrowed consequences. The practice of transforming the land is indispensably tied to forces external to the design itself. In much the same way, landscape architectural history grafts itself to diverse allied disciplines, from agronomy to art, engineering, and architecture.

Live Matter introduces an alternative to dualistic readings that counterpose qualitative and quantitative information, art and science, scientific proof and verifiable observation ultimately humans and plants.

Exhibition produced by ARCHIZOOM EPFL and the RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE at HARVARD UNIVERSITY

CONCEPT, INSTALLATION and AUTHOR:
Rosetta Sarah Elkin
Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture
Harvard University, Graduate School of Design

Exhibition partners:
Matthew Skjonsberg, Researcher at lab-U EPFL

with the support of the Service des parcs et domaines de la Ville de Lausanne, direction du patrimoine vert.

Exhibition views