doblar una flor

As part of the Second Open Studios Day, held on 30 May 2025, a conversation was held with those attending about the project “Antejardín”, together with the workshop “Doblar una flor”, run at Casa Fernández within the En Bloque residency of Idartes.

The conversation opened with a presentation of the project, which takes an interest in the antejardín —the front garden— as a space between the street and the house: a place neither wholly public nor wholly private, liminal, a threshold. The project works with the objects that inhabit it —watering cans, spades, containers, soil and fountains— and with how, rather than reproducing their shape or their use, it unsettles them to let their fragility show. We spoke about the ceramic pieces that come out of that process: watering cans without holes, containers that leak, ceramic flowers rising out of a mound of earth. These pieces do not set out to resolve a function but to raise questions about it, and about the order of the domestic, the decorative and the useful.

From there, the workshop proposed carrying the question of the garden into the immediate surroundings: the flora of the Parque Nacional. The participants talked about the plants that inhabit this public space, their forms, their names and the relationships people have with them, while colouring in prints of three chosen species. Colouring worked as an unhurried activity that accompanied the talk and encouraged close attention to each flower.

The workshop, open and participatory, was attended by six people. In this way the project reached beyond the exhibition room, into a space of exchange where people could relate to the flora of the park through drawing.