Epicurus Garden: Between Yard and World: The Performance as Artefact within Practice Research in Architecture: An Operatic Piano Performance

SETTING Epicurus (341-270 BCE) welcomed in his Garden people of all kind. Different from other philosophers that practiced in public, Epicurus created an enclosed space in which a more inclusive school could be established. One could argue that the enclosed space of the garden was more public than the open space of the Painted Stoa where Zeno practiced. It certainly was very civic… In the area around EPICURUS’ GARDEN, figures are meandering in a taxonomic landscape of fragments. The spaces they explore, are constructed as a progressional ordering of reality. It is an enfilade, it is a suite. It is borrowed space. There is music and there are shadow-sites… A strange loop, a garden of forking paths, develops between Yard and World… THEME Between Yard and World’ is a novel by Paul De Wispelaere (1928-2016). From the safe enclosure of the garden, the main character in the book ponders the changing world outside. He positions the house between the garden (yard) and the world. Although it is a novel about distancing (from a changing world) the novel brings a specific ‘filter’ to the practice research. The paradoxical situation of distancing: being separate from, and at the same time embedding: being part of, is a poetic tension and ambiguity that is at the core of (a vantage point within, a lens on…) the manifold practice. The yard that is separate from the world, yet part of the world, a world that exists of yards... something emerges. What would happen when a world is embedded in a yard? Describing and working with yard and world is the continuous drawing of a distinctions. Something emerges between yard and world. This ‘something’, this ‘between’ is equally a moment, a place and a relation.status: publishe