2025
STATUS
VALLETTA, MALTA
QUEBEC, CANADA
LOCATION
ANN DINGLI
AP VALLETTA
COLLABORATORS
MARCHER,
C’EST SE METTRE À RÊVER
Commenting on
humanity’s interventions
to gardens over time.
Designed as ‘sensory cartography’, a walkable path tracks the sensations of a garden’s life. Along one water channel, a hybridised garden – composed of plant-life able to flourish in Quebec, as well as the Mediterranean context it comes from – gives a phenomenological experience of how ecology and identity intertwine within green spaces.
COLLABORATORS
Ann Dingli
AP Valletta
COMPETITIONS
27th Quebec International Garden Festival,
Shortlisted
‘Marcher, c’est se mettre à rêver’ (to walk is to dream) is a line from The
Poetics of Space (1958), written by phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard,
exploring how intimate spaces shape imagination, memory, and being.
The garden, in its ever-changing physicality and sensory offering, is the most intimate of spaces.
The installation presents chapters of sensation as a linear journey. It begins
with water, surrounded by lush vegetation. The channel descends –
vegetation changes to plants sustained by moderate watering. Finally, water
seeps into the ground, marking an end and a renewal, surrounded now by
resilient, arid landscape. The transition from lush to arid plant-life comments
on wider issues of water shortages afflicting the Maltese Islands, other
Mediterranean climates, and beyond; a phenomenon that in turn impacts
humanity’s relationship with gardens.
Our installation interrogates the phenomenological and ecological iterations of gardens as ceaseless environments. Because gardens are constantly in flux, their sensorial impact is never static. The installation also comments on humanity’s interventions to gardens over time, questioning how far human manipulation impacts their experience. The design also offers a direct sensory experience – the act of walking through a stream of water and feeling, in sequence, the life of a garden
