Biennale Gherdëina 10

(Future) Paradise Gardens
Introduction by Samuel Leuenberger 

There is something both improbable and necessary about imagining a garden in the mountains. 

Improbable, because the garden usually arrives in our cultural imagination as a place of measured abundance: an enclosure of growth, protection, and cultivation; a terrain in which human intention meets natural vitality and, at least temporarily, appears to guide it. Necessary, because in a mountainous landscape such as Val Gardena, where altitude, exposure, erratic weather, and short growing seasons constantly remind us of the limits of cultivation, the very idea of the garden is stripped of complacency. Here, a garden cannot merely be decorative, nor can it easily sustain the fantasy of full control. It becomes something more fragile and more urgent: a negotiation with circumstance, a choreography of care, a study in adaptation, humility, and persistence. 

It was from this tension that Biennale Gherdëina 10, (Future) Paradise Gardens, first took shape. I began with a desire to think through a number of overlapping concerns: the symbolic charge of the garden across history; the politics embedded in botanical ordering and cultivated space; the violence hidden within ideals of beauty, harmony, and care; the spiritual, emotional, and poetic potential of gardens as sites of retreat, contemplation, and renewal; and finally, the possibility that a garden and to a larger extent nature in general, might still offer a common ground from which to imagine more just and livable futures. Yet as invitations were extended and projects began to emerge, the exhibition itself changed course. It became less an argument imposed on a place than a field of responses shaped by artists listening intently to the valley, its people, its rituals, its architectures, and its stories, the urban affect on nature and much more. 

The exhibition is structured around a distinct set of thoughts and ideas, six themes that served the artists as prompts or rather conceptual guidelines—each examining a different facet of the human-made construct we call a garden. Symbolically, metaphorically, and emotionally, the themes center around notions of Commoning—where growing and sharing food, alongside caretaking and preserving traces of all life, are given priority. Another chapter, titled Divine Love and Growth, invites contemplation of the garden as a symbol of spiritual flourishing and transcendence. The exhibition further delves into the concept of the Violent Garden, addressing the urgent need to decolonize the garden—challenging anthropocentric views and creating space for animals and nature to move freely and reclaim agency. The subject around Queer Ecology interrogates why nature is often perceived as inherently queer, expanding the conversation on diversity and fluidity within ecological systems. Additionally, we explore the Botanical—the ordering and classification of plant specimens—versus Gardens as Spaces for Reflection and Poetry, where gardens transform into sites of introspection, beauty, and creative imagination. 

To welcome visitors into (Future) Paradise Gardens is not to invite them into a finished world. It is to invite them into an argument, a rehearsal, a shared terrain of questions. What do we cultivate, and why? What are we protecting, and from whom? How do we care without overpowering? How do we make space for other forms of life, other temporalities, other knowledges? How do we imagine a paradise without walls? And how might a garden, especially here in the mountains, become less a place of resolution than a place of learning—where we come not to confirm what we already know, but to remain available to transformation? 

A future paradise garden, if it exists at all, will not be one in which all conflict disappears. It will be one in which we learn to meet one another within conflict differently. It will not ask us to agree on everything, but to recognise our entanglement. It will not deliver innocence, but responsibility. It will not erase limitation, but teach us how to inhabit it with greater care, imagination, and mutuality. 

In that sense, the future paradise garden is not elsewhere. It does not wait at the end of history, nor behind the walls of a recovered Eden. It begins wherever we accept that life is shared, that control is partial, that growth is relational, and that even in damaged landscapes something unexpected may still take root. Here, in the Dolomites, among stone, wood, fog, memory, labour, and history, that beginning feels both fragile and entirely real.