Playsages

For its 18th edition, the International Garden Festival decided to put fun in first place. the “Playsages” offered by this year’s Festival invited designers and visitors to play. The Festival also wanted designers to respond to our growing distance and alienation from the natural world.

  Small plots of land on wheels, wagons for children, are made available to be chosen, adopted and brought along at L’Escale installation by Collectif Escargo (Pierre-Yves Diehl, designer, Karyna St-Pierre, landscape architect & Julie Parenteau, art teacher – Montréal, Canada). In The Woodstock by Atelier YokYok (Steven Fuhrman, Samson Lacoste & Luc Pinsard, architects, Laure K, teacher, and Pauline Lazareff, architect engineer – Paris), an unusual playground grows in the shade of trees and forms a play space where the children become giants. La Chrysalide by landscape architects Gabriel Lacombe and Virginie Roy-Mazoyer – Vancouver and Montréal – is an invitation to take a break in time, between childhood and adulthood, to climb into the tree, make a nest and lay there to dream.

Paysage euphonique by MANI (Claudia Campeau, architect, and Maud Benech, designer – Montréal) is a set of giant play facilities that creates a tension in our relationship with the landscape and forces us to see and hear nature differently. Soundcloud by Johanna Ballhaus, landscape architect, and Helen Wyss, architects from Montréal and Fribourg, Switzerland, feature bells attached to the ends of metal rods create the illusion of mist and clouds where a dialogue with nature begins and where stories can be told. Haiku, by architects Francisco A. Garcia Pérez & Alessandra Vignotto (Granada, Spain) is a lonely swing in the forest, a flooded path, a motionless stone where everything is in place to appreciate the cycle of the forest life.

through December 2017
18th International Garden Festival
Les jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens
200, route 132
Grand-Métis, Quebec, Canada