10/07/2025
Jardin de la Paix . Metz. Update 2025
The Peace Garden of Metz is dedicated to women as engines of peace in men's wars.
The garden is designed as a place of tranquility and reflection, the circumscribed void is the protagonist with few other signs. His drawing evokes traces of artistic memory, sad and happy events, life, and the encounter between Russia and France with artists who have experienced this link like Sonia Delauney.
The design of the garden is inspired by an excellent suggestion of the Russian avant-garde artworks of Rodchenko and Sonia Delauney mixed with the pop culture of Ivan Kupala and the great suggestions of the Russian landscape of Ivan Shishkin .
The two large circles of raised earth are like topological signs evoking a fallen bomb, interrupted by nature which has taken possession of them; nature has won and it mixes to create a protected place.
The circular signs generate a place isolated from the demons of war, or earthly demons as in the pagan Russian and Eastern European festival of Ivan Kupala, the shortest night of the year, during which people search for the fern flower (ferns do not produce flowers but spores), whoever finds it will have magical and mysterious powers. In the center, a void space marked by two long recycled-recovered industrial profiles of burned wood (war, iron, and fire), placed from north to south as if to evoke the imaginary line of the eastern front. The profiles that fit into the existing ground, as if to look like a relic, a memory, become a long bench that crosses the whole garden. At one edge of this line, supported by iron profiles, there is a large red inscription “МИР” (“MIR”, peace in Russian) like an ever-burning fire, a perpetual light of peace, readable both from east and west, from all parts of the deployments. The white gravel center circle leads to the “peace light” and is dotted with red bark shrubs (Cornus sibirica) and perennials. In the shady part under the existing trees are scattered ferns, plants that do not bloom but silently spread through spores allegorically as peace between peoples. Writing in the garden as in the works of the Russian avant-garde become three-dimensional and alive, like a reminder and a warning for future generations.
https://www.sdarch.it/en/ProjectDetails.aspx?ProjectId=3140
