PlanetEye

On Wednesday July 16, at 2:00PM, the exhibition «The Visionaries Garden» at Quebec's Museum of civilisation got its two hundred thousandth visitor.   Claire Simard, the executive director of that Museum, won the bet she made a few months ago when deciding to take the Museum out of the Museum and make it a creation of its own right.  

The many steps on the Museum's roof are completely covered with a vegetable garden.   The idea of Franco Dragone, the project‘s artistic director, was to give voice to the epic tale of a fabulous, fragile, threatened world that is ours.   Visitors are welcomed on the side walk by a metal sculpture, the stylised figure of a boatman who presents himself as a guardian of dreams keeping watch on the horizon of our tomorrow.

In Dragone's mind, the exhibition is aimed at the generation of tomorrow and seeks to make us aware that this generation and others to follow will be paying for the mistake we make in our present exploitation of the earth's resources.  Such resources: wind, symbolised by a huge aluminium sculpture reminiscent of a pinwheel, light, bursting when darkness fails, various vegetables and flowers filling planters along the stairs, and water, flowing in an elaborate system of pipes, are the stars of the show.   All the way up the stairs is a well from the bottom of which voices of children tell us, in simple words, their lives in our world, their fears and their hopes for tomorrow.

This garden, with a strong aesthetic concept, is essentially a garden of food for the body. Vegetables harvested are donated regularly to the Maison L'Aubinière, a nearby homeless shelter. But most of all, it is also a garden of food for our thoughts.

The exhibition will be open until October 13, day when we celebrate thanksgiving in Québec city.  Demonstrations, dances and performances are scheduled for that day.