“The garden as a whole could be seen as a theater in which the visitor strolled from one stage to another, from scene to scene, and in so doing, reactivated certain memories and allegorical images within the environment.” (Dan Graham, Garden as Theater as Museum, 1989).

The large-scale textile collages of Astronomical Gardens immerse the viewer in their folds. Each one is conceived of as a scene in itself, in the tradition of theater scenery from the Romantic period. Their title refers to the symbolic importance of gardens, that cultural form which uses plants and other living organisms to express human fantasies, such as idyllic visions of Paradise.
The collages represent spatial landscapes or astronomical phenomena: Astronomical Garden #1 depicts the surface of our Moon, while #2 features falling celestial objects – satellite crashes, meteor showers. They are composed from a wide array of images, visions sourced from ancient archives, online databases, specialized libraries, and more. Some images are enlarged, others are manually transformed then digitized, all of them are printed on cotton and sewn together. Each garden is composed from this hybrid database, borrowing from mythical beliefs as much as scientific data, distilling the wide spectrum of astronomical imagery into a landscape of dreamy speculations.

With their condensed centuries of information and their formal reference to the theater, the Astronomical Gardens question our contemporary relationship to images. In our hyper-saturated world, reality and illusion are becoming blurred: what is the line between science and imagination? How much do preexisting narratives distort our perceptions? The landscapes from Astronomical Gardens seem closer than ever, not because of advancements in space travel, but because of our increasing delusion. Like a garden, each scene represents something both natural and artificial; like a garden, each one demands vigilance, attention, and care.