“Candide’s Garden”

Zahra Safaverdi - Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellow, Kent State University

With Candide’s garden, literature have been used as a proxy for architecture to discover its latent spatial potential. Voltaire’s “Candide” greatly resonates with us: from its satirical stance toward inequality in the world by criticizing dogma and advocating freedom of speech to being a canonical representation of a work of the enlightenment era. By close reading of motifs represented in the book, with a focus on gardens and the metaphor of journey from one part of the world to another, representation of “Candide” have been taken many steps further from being mere illustrations. With a focused methodology, established modes of projections have been followed to invent new ways of spatial representation based on existing transformational operations. Doing so shifts the focus from representation to condition of representation and from expression to “material condition of expression.”

 With this cohesive collection of works, which take various forms from 3D miniature worlds to occupy-able shape shifting drawings, the grain of data and layered information becomes the new materiality for the space of the exhibition. Motifs assume an abstracted form and objects lose their established meaning. The gallery turns into a grounded space-time continuum to bring into being distant points in history in our immediate adjacency. Armstrong gallery is, now, in a proper state of in-between where Candide’s reality and ours tend to coexist.