Jardim Iluminado

BEATRIZ BRUM | SOFIA CAETANO | CRISTINA ATAÍDE

Let us consider gardens in order to talk about their opposition and their reinvention. The garden can be understood as a form of domesticated nature, a space where human intervention shapes and controls natural elements to create an organised, aesthetically arranged, and often functional landscape. It lies at the intersection between culture and nature, as a manifestation of the human desire to order the natural world according to symbolic, aesthetic, philosophical and even utilitarian values.

The idea of a domesticated nature suggests a contrast between the uncontrollable natural world and the human action that seeks to organise it. Gardening can therefore be perceived as a civilising process, in which spontaneous vegetation is replaced by a calculated arrangement. According to Michel Baridon, in Histoire des Jardins, gardens represent an attempt to reconcile nature’s freedom with a power structure imposed by human culture. This domestication can be understood through the opposition between physis (nature as something spontaneous, according to Greek philosophy) and nomos (human norms and conventions). The garden synthesises these two concepts: whilst preserving natural elements, it subjects them to a set of symbolic rules, creating an artificially organised place of nature.

Ana Cristina Cachola

March 2025