The Ignorant Gardener

Yurian Quintanas Nobel

Gardens and orchards offer a unique perspective to understand the complex and dynamic relationship between humans and the natural environment. For centuries, the transmission of knowledge acquired in horticultural practices played a major role in the evolution of our society both culturally and technologically. But in recent years, mainly due to the conveniences offered by new technologies and their exponential growth, more and more people have become disconnected from nature, resulting in an increasingly digital society that lacks the basic knowledge to understand natural processes in general.

The Ignorant Gardener is a photographic project that draws on artistic movements such as constructivism, ready-made, bauhaus or even surrealism. Through the mixture of different artistic disciplines such as sculpture and digital photography, the purpose is to create a series of unlikely images with compositions outside of any physical logic to make us reflect on the lack of knowledge that contemporary generations have of one of the oldest trades in the world, horticulture.

The procedure consists of creating ephemeral sculptures from the combination of different elements and objects that can be found in a vegetable garden. Vegetables, artifacts and tools that farmers use on a daily basis for the proper functioning of their crops are selected and grouped together without any functional link and focusing purely on their aesthetic characteristics. These sculptures are constructed in-situ and with the landscape formed by the orchards as a backdrop. Finally, these sculptures are immortalized in the form of a photographic still life, and once the purpose has been achieved, each object is returned to its original place.

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