Our world is not only made up of urban and rural spaces, cities and countryside but also of those uncertain and indeterminate borders that come to life between them. Gilles Clément, one of Europe's greatest landscape artists, claims that they are "composition ground, creative laboratory, fertile magma" (Corriere della Sera, 16 October 2012). Here perhaps the presence of the third landscape is stronger, a concept that indicates all the "places abandoned by man": parks and nature reserves, the large uninhabited areas of the planet, but also smaller and more widespread spaces, almost invisible: the abandoned industrial areas where brambles and scrub grow; the weeds in the center of a traffic island... Spaces different from each other yet united by the absence of human activity and, in a certain sense, fundamental for the conservation of biological diversity. Clément, however, takes us beyond definitions and in a journey-reflection on the relationship between man and nature makes us discover how it is possible to rethink the order of nature. Maybe freeing it, finally, and preparing for the "garden revolution".
Meeting organized in collaboration with quodlibet
Gilles Clément (1943), professor at the École Nationale du Paysage in Versailles and writer, is one of the best-known and most influential landscape painters in Europe. He created important gardens and parks, including La Défense, André Citroën and the Matisse park. Among his many publications, many of which were also translated into Italian, we should mention the anthology Il giardiniere planetario, 22 Publishing 2008 and Elogio delle vagabonde, Derive Approdi 2010. For the Quodlibet types instead Manifesto del Terzo paesaggio (2005), Il giardino in movimento (2011) and Breve storia del giardino (2012).
Manuel Orazi (Macerata, 1974) trained as an architectural and city historian in Venice. He is a contract professor of theories of contemporary architecture at the faculties of architecture of Ascoli Piceno and Cesena. He works for the Quodlibet publishing house, where he is a press agent and deals with architecture titles, and collaborates with some newspapers and magazines including "Abitare" and "Log". Since 2011 he has been part of the scientific committee of Festarch International Architecture Festival of Perugia.