The Garden as Infrastructure

The garden is generally considered a place of cultivation, growth, and regeneration, the antithesis of cities, industry, and violence. But this idea has itself evolved over time. For thousands of years, gardens have served not only as places of relaxation and food supply, but also as spatial models of social order. In ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Rome, gardens were more than just ornamental or utilitarian spaces: they translated cosmological ideas and societal structures into designed landscapes. Water, plants, paths, and other forms of delimitation were used to organise nature and make this order spatially tangible. Just as the biblical Garden of Eden was fenced in, it was also historically separated from its surroundings. The garden is thus always also a realm of disciplining, a school for how to see and deal with life. Plants are selected, positioned, and pruned; paths direct movement; fences mark transitions. It is a terrain in which forms of nature are made legible and reproducible, a microcosm of social order.

Nevertheless, the garden is not solely representative of order; it is also about space and feeling. It induces a sensory experience: the rustling of leaves, the splashing of water, the play of light and shadow. These qualities conjure an atmosphere of closeness, intimacy, rootedness, and movement. Even a fragmented or artificial garden can achieve this effect, which occasions contemplation of the tension between perception and structure, between growth and limitation. In the garden, we learn to channel our bodies and our attention; we hear, smell, feel, and orient ourselves to the rhythms of nature.

In Melike Kara’s exhibition Whispers, this sensorial aspect is deliberately intensified. The seedlings, water, fabrics, and basins create a spatial sensation of fragility and vibrancy – a liveliness simultaneously reminiscent of historic interventions. The site-specific installation treats the garden not as an idyllic landscape, but as a structure of conditionality. Here, concepts of care and deliberate formation are inseparably linked. That which is cared for is at the same time restricted; what grows does so under conditions that are predetermined. Remembrance and erasure exist side by side: burnt archival images bear traces of past orders while new life emerges from them. Growth does not appear as something that occurs naturally, but as something that has always been regulated and framed. The installation thus unfolds as a fragmented, artificially created garden space. Water – a recurring symbol of life and renewal – is collected, dammed, and channelled. Instead of flowing freely, it is led through gaps, basins, and hidden technical systems. This channelling is a reference to infrastructure – invisible systems through which resources are distributed and landscapes are shaped. Pumps and hoses, though essential to the process, are relegated to the background. Plants do not germinate in open soil, but in layers of fabric and cotton wool – in temporary microhabitats. Soil, which in gardens typically takes on the role of a connecting space, is absent. Instead, artificial substrates are utilised that simultaneously enable while also limiting growth. These elements remind us less of a “natural” landscape than of a laboratory, an archive, an environment that has been meticulously arranged. The garden thus appears as a designed structure. Rather than a neutral setting, it constitutes a spatial practice of determining which forms of life are protected, which are suppressed, and which are rendered invisible. This fragmentation reflects a history of human garden creation in which landscapes were dismantled, reassembled, and robbed of their relational logic. Whispers reveals these hidden inscriptions, not through direct representation, but through the use of material, processes and tension.

Against this backdrop, other often overlooked forms of gardening also come into focus, though they appear as absences rather than as direct representations – as that which is missing and yet still resonates. The artificially confined garden that has sprouted from this installation can be read as a reflection on historical systems of ordering juxtaposed with alternative practices: models in which land is understood not as a fixed territory but as a dynamic, relational structure. A striking example of such practices are the floating gardens in so-called Mexico known as chinampas. These systems, developed long before colonisation, are based on cyclical, regenerative relationships between water, plants, soil, and human practices. Chinampas are living structures that move with the water, absorbing it and later returning it. Here, land is not a static possession, but rather a continuous process, something which is constantly being recreated through care, repetition, and collective knowledge. Similar principles can be found in the Indigenous gardening practices of Kurdistan. Here, too, one can find gardens that defy the logic of representation: small-scale, fragmented, communally organized gardens, closely bound to seasonal rhythms, local soils, and collective memory. Rather than being places of conspicuous display, their purpose is to ensure continuity. Rather than being archived, knowledge is passed on orally, through hands-on experience, and the repetition of everyday practices. The gardens’ constant exposure to threat – be it in the form of state violence, military destruction, expropriation, or large-scale infrastructure projects – points to a systematic control of landscapes that inevitably means control over bodies, mobility, and memories. When gardens are destroyed, it is not only food that people are being deprived of, but also time: the time of cycles, of passing on, of putting down roots.

In this context, it becomes clear how colonialism, whether in the past or present, has involved a global form of landscaping that continues to shape our relationship with nature to this day. Nature no longer appears as an independent, relational structure, but as objects that can be named, manipulated, destroyed, or preserved. We call artificial arrangements like parks, botanical gardens, and reconstructed landscapes “nature” while at the same time continuing to destroy real, living ecosystems. We learn to see nature as a resource, as stages for human order, and lose contact with its processual qualities. Whispers makes this tension tangible. The seedlings appear as fragile descendants of such displaced gardening logics. Instead of growing in open soil, they thrive in precarious, artificial environments, sustained by fabrics, water, and remnants of a damaged archive. Their growth is not a return to a lost state of purity, but a manifestation of a subtle persistence, continuing to grow in spite of the fragmentation, control, and deprivation that they have been subjected to. What also becomes apparent here is the artist’s detachment from fixed identities: life itself, its relational connections, and its cycles and transitions come to the fore, while anthropocentric attributions, logics of ownership, and systems of order recede. Identity dissolves while remaining perceptible in the process of its disappearance. The garden thus becomes a venue of negotiation: it invites us to relate our own bodies, attention and perception to the unfolding rhythms of light, water, material, and seedlings. Seen from this perspective, the garden is not a confined space, but an open one – an accessible, vibrant state of affairs in which growth, circulation, and relational life become immediately perceptible.