Laurens Kolks > spatial design

Phantomgarten

models

The castle complex Schloß Ahaus contains a very obvious architectural dead end: a monumental balcony at the backside of the castle. Approaching the Schlosspark from inside the castle -starting you walk in the corridor, through the beautiful garden room onto the balcony- is an anticlimax: there is no mesmerising view. This view did however exist. From the early 18th up untill the early 20th century the balcony overlooked the castle's specially designed Baroque garden.

This installation for the Skulptur-Biennale restores the balcony's view and therefore uses the core concept of the Baroque garden: it provides the viewer with the illusion of grasping nature by catching it in systematical geometry. It restores some key Baroque features of the view: its elementary play between foreground (measurable) and background (unmeasurable), its focus on the plain, the perspective and the illusion as tools to achieve a spacial experience.

Sculptures that ones decorated the Baroque garden are now standing inside the castle's Garden Room for conservatory reasons. A carpet with Baroque ornaments is placed on the floor of the corridor right before the entrance of the emptied garden room where it continues towards the balcony. The carpet with its Baroque layouts brings the garden inside and intensifies the walk towards the balcony.

The view from the balcony is ordered by reintroducing the straight line. The walls of the garden room are continued onto and over the balcony, limiting the view. The water of the canal is artificially heightened by pumping it into a basin with its water surface placed just under the balcony floor level. As the bassin gets closer to the horizon it gets increasingly shallow ending in just a line of water. The new watersurface blocks out the view of the canal and creates a new horizon.

Looking from the Schlosspark it is visible how the illusion of the 'new' view is constructed. The audience gets to see both the show and a view backstage. The water pooring over the edge of the basin makes up a waterfall.

Production

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