Giardino
BYRON GAGO
Red Circle · 2015
Within a perimeter of four spruce planks screwed into a rectangle, one hundred kilograms of untreated cement powder are laid and levelled. The surface is worked from side to side, mechanically and rhythmically, until every trace of the hand that worked it is gone: a deserted expanse held inside a formwork, the casing in which concrete is normally poured and left to set. Giardino is a point of suspension that contains, at once, the origin of the matter and its pulverization.
The levelling cannot do what it sets out to do. The labour that erases the human trace is itself a human trace. The surface is worked-over to look untouched, and the working-over stays legible in the very flatness. The failure of the gesture is the work. What you read is not the absence of the hand but the most thorough mark it can leave: the trace of a deliberate erasure. This is the dystopian image the title carries, a landscape so administered that the administration has been buffed off its own surface.
The wooden frame is the form that holds the innocent matter of childhood: sand, the playable substance of the sandbox. Giardino keeps the frame and inverts the substance: in the same container it lays cement, the material whose life begins in extraction and ends in rubble. Childhood is not contaminated by industry; childhood and industry are shown to share one containing form. The continuity between them is what unsettles.
Cement is among the largest single sources of human-made carbon. To pour a hundred kilograms of it and stay silent on that cost would be an evasion; here it is a position. The work is made of the material whose use is the problem, and does not pretend otherwise. The garden of the title is not a refuge from the industrial. It is what the industrial calls a garden once it has finished its work.
"The labour required to erase human presence is itself human presence. The work cannot achieve what it claims."
Critical review, 2026
I want to keep that contradiction rather than resolve it. The levelling gesture cannot succeed at its stated goal, and the failure of the gesture is the work itself. The wiping produces not less human trace but more, and it stays readable in the flatness it leaves behind.
Giardino
2015
Final work
- Installation — cement, spruce formwork
- 100 kg cement · 220 × 140 cm
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The exhibited surface was a single moment in a longer cycle. The cement was photographed at the instant of levelling and set within hours; when the show closed, it was returned to a quarry and ground back into aggregate. The work's full duration runs from quarry to formwork to surface to aggregate. The object on the floor was one frame of that loop, caught and held.
The frame sits below knee height; the work is walked around, not entered, and read from above. The viewer looks down into it as into a pit, a pool, a foundation. That vertical position is the work's argument: erasure is what you see from above, the satellite reading of a quarry, the architectural plan that turns ground into space-to-be-built.
Giardino belongs to a pair with Perro: where Perro leaves the formwork-grid empty and adds the abandoned body, Giardino fills the formwork and shows what it contains. And it is the studio rehearsal for Guerrero Viejo: the same erasure read later at scale, with people inside it, as what a hundred kilograms of cement becomes when it is one dam holding back a town.
Giardino
2015
Studio / process
- Process documentation
- Formwork · levelling · quarry cycle
01 / 01