'Witz Garden', Off-Site Group Project in Iveco Nu·e (Noisy-le-Sec, France)

(1) The fragile garden I once proudly nurtured fell out of my hands and found itself covered with a concrete slab. The many separate elements do not make sense together anymore; the cohesion has disappeared and I find myself faced with labelled fragments of skin, of air, of breath, of sound, of gestures, of landscape... I have certainly never done other than pass along fragments, splinters and seeds sieved through my fingers — sometimes scratched, sometimes appreciating the sensation or the surprising weight of materials. The possibility of a fragment is to be and no longer to represent, in a shape that, being all shapes, does not realize the whole, but manifests itself in discontinuity, perhaps in dispersion. 

(2) One can hardly say that Garden exists. There are analogies we refer to as “garden”, but they are more repetitions, added heterogeneity in the field of gardening. In this sense, witzgarden is simply an instance, a repetition, a simple singularity, pure will, disorganization, an organ of collective thought... 

(3) Maybe I should never have turned my eyes away from the garden. I broke off the charm. But other things have interposed themselves between us, have distracted my attention and all hopes of harmonisation have faded. Time is now precipitated in the exhilarating wait of the end, beyond everything, because next to the kinds of language where the whole constructs itself, another speech is activated delivering the thought of being only thought as a totality. I try to put my hands back in the earth, but the starlings warble discordantly from the trees nearby. I ask myself how I can reconnect myself to the garden. I look closer to the different parts and realize they are fulfilling themselves in many directions. It is an essential discontinuity that excites me and discourages me at once. 

(4) As a relational model, witzgarden rejects Being and seeks to affirm itself as pure Becoming. This is a land of singularities that refuses any transcendence, one can only wander around. Neither “à la Française” nor “à l’Anglaise”, it is a place where essence is not recognized as the paragon of truth and where differences are the only thing that matters. 

(5) Here, the words have been put on hold. Because writing is to allow a speech that does not aim to say things, but to do by letting itself be, without making itself the new object of this language with no object. I pull away from the words that jump on me unexpectedly. Unexpected words jump on me. Two contiguous words, Witz Garden: a fragile and decorative container that navigates in high seas, I only see the island now when I should see the archipelago. The fragmentary yet to be determined, the neutral as in “neither nor the other” seem to be communicating “between” the parts, to make an assembly. An interstitial garden, fractal and paradoxal, that supposes a relationship to the other, revealing neither objective discontinuities nor subjective dispositions, reaching towards the affirmation of a new relation, the one that could be at stake in the juxtaposition that gives its name to the exhibition. 

— DR