Register/Submit: 12 November 2010
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The Theme of the 2011 Festival: “SECRET GARDENS”
This year the theme of the Festival is "Secret Gardens". Each year the Festival chooses a theme
that guides the spirit of an edition while also exploring a very particular aspect of contemporary
garden design.
Secret gardens are part of our lives, figuratively and literally. Who has not had in childhood a
secret space? Everyone has experienced at once the need to create a territory enveloped by
nature and in touch with the inner world. Secret gardens are re-assuring, they wrap us in a
protective cocoon and stimulate the imagination. Both a shelter and a refuge from the world, they
act as doors for a dialogue both with oneself and with the universe. From a scientific perspective
the secret garden offers a complete ecological system in which living organisms live in symbiosis.
This ideal biodiversity makes the secret garden the perfect place to connect with nature and to be
inspired by it.
Secret Gardens of the future
At a time when design and landscape design in general are being pushed towards the superficial
and the materialistic, it is important to bring these disciplines to a more human scale and closer to
existential questions. By focusing on the theme of “Secret Gardens”, designers should consider
their projects with the idea of a "protective" space, full of emotions, mysteries and wonder and
connected to the natural world. For the 2011 edition of the Festival, designers are asked to
imagine the secret garden for the 21st Century and are asked to create a “scripted space”, a
unique place that speaks to the designer but also offers an environment that is perhaps strange
or mothering, healing or inspiring.
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