The garden is all at once botanic and literary. The personalities attributed to the sinner plants are revealed on the basis of their manner of growth, or of their names. They are living species, and they seek to deceive you with their apparent immobility. The confessional reveals to us the truth about those plants linked to sins, and we discover their portion of humanity: pride, envy, anger, sloth, lust, greed, and gluttony. The whole garden is put together to position the visitor as sole judge, and to be solely capable of developing her / his curiosity.
Take the time to sit in the enclosed area, to read, to meditate - before leaving the Jardin des Pécheresses (“Sinners’ garden” )and having to, once again, go through the confessional in order to leave.
designers
COLLECTIF GAMA –Mélanie GASTÉ and Aurélien ALBERT, landscape engineers-
FRANCE
GAMA is a new collective formed by Mélanie Gasté and Aurélien Albert, landscaper engineers of the class of 2011 of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Nature et du Paysage de Blois. The collective was born from a shared desire to support an attentive and renewed vision of the landscape. To approach the process of a step as emotionally sensitive as it is carefully planned, as artistic as it is ingenious, and as much to do with set design as it is with landscape.
"We have all trained in landscaping, but we have different approaches to it which can be explained by what we have done previously. Mélanie studied art at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Appliqués et des Métiers d’Arts (Paris). Aurélien has a more technical background in Landscape Planning. Our vision of the landscape is thus shared by the same criteria, both technical and emotionally sensitive. In our work we endeavour to analyse and understand the essence of the project in order to give a simple response to a given issue. For us, the artistic approach is essential in this process of reflection, as it feeds the synthesis and know-how available to the project.”
Mélanie Gasté is an engineer landscaper and a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Nature et du Paysage de Blois. She combines a broad vision of the landscape, in its ecological and architectural dimensions, with a varied artistic approach. Her end of studies project endeavoured to rediscover the continuities and common elements of the landscape along the banks of the Oise in the Ile de France region in order to bring the two sides, whose uses differ, closer together. This project was an opportunity to understand different experiences of the landscape along the water, a theme which she had already approached during an Erasmus exchange at the Académie Van Bouwkunst in Amsterdam in 2009. In addition to large spaces, she likes the reduced scale of gardens and the freedom of creation and composition that they offer. Established as a "freelancer" since November 2011, she also works part time at Sativa Paysage, a design company in Blois. Her work providing assistance to project managers has provided her with extensive experience of projects in the public market.
Aurélien Albert is a landscaper engineer and a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure de la Nature et du Paysage de Blois. Following his studies, he joined the ATP Architecture, Territoires & Paysage studio in Toulouse. He developed an approach to spatial planning which is both sensitive and technical and looked into urban river landscapes during his degree. The work that he carried out on Ramier Island in Toulouse led him to study the issues of the city/river relationship and the current need for a resurgence of nature in cities and the place to give to it. Moreover, his technical training has always steered him towards gardens. He invested in a private garden in Chouzy/Cisse (41) for three years. This experience gave him the opportunity to put to the test both his design skills and production skills, and was for him a real field of experimentation.
