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‘Little garden as an homage to Vicino Orsini’ – Project for a sports centre Geneva (CH) 1985
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For the ancient Greeks, a complete human being had to be a sportsman as well as a poet, an athlete as well as a philosopher. Things today are very different and the gap which separates the physical man from the academic seems to deepen increasingly.
The purpose of this piece is to invite the visitor of the sport centre to unconsciously slip from physical gymnastics to mental gymnastics. An enquiry amongst the users obviously demonstrated a lack of interest for any artistic invasion on the site. The idea is to invite the viewer to confront the ‘known’ through a different approach.
The formal vocabulary is borrowed from the instruments and machines one can find in any gym today, which are very familiar to users. The elements are grouped on a space approximately the size of a tennis court. Not located on a horizontal ground, the ensemble adopts the setting of the field slope, making the use of the instruments difficult, if not impossible.The practice of this ‘mental gymnastics’ can be extended to any other domain of life Inviting people to think of the overestimated confidence we so often have in our certitudes and convictions which give us quite a restrictive image of the world around us.