A garden is a symbolic universe, a cultural landscape that speaks of the aspirations and sensitivities of those who have designed, cared for, and lived within it. Marcel Rauschkolb’s project The Garden is set in the grounds of a hotel in Merano, South Tyrol—a place that unfolds before the viewer as both poetic and visual experience. This garden has nothing of the strict geometry and imposing symmetry of Baroque parks; rather, it approaches the idea of the landscape garden, where the human hand seems to accompany, rather than dominate, the vitality of nature. As Rauschkolb underlines through a quotation from Goethe, used as a key to reading the work: “The garden is not elaborate, and the moment you walk into it, you feel that it was designed by a sensitive heart rather than a scientific gardener, a heart that sought to find its enjoyment there.”
Rauschkolb does not aim to present an inventory of species, nor to impose a rigid or definitive vision of the space. Instead, the artist gathers fragments, suggestions, glimpses—as if the garden itself were revealing itself in parts: the bust of a statue engulfed by vegetation, a lizard camouflaged on the stone, the shadow of the photographer spilling into the frame. These are images that evoke intimacy and belonging, like postcards faded by time. The choice of black and white accentuates the precariousness of time, transporting the viewer into a realm of past memories, discreet and whispered.
Rauschkolb is fascinated by the experiments of Anna Atkins, pioneer of botanical photography, and incorporates cyanotypes into his work. With their deep blue tones and forms dissolving into abstraction, these prints open up a perception that is less objective, more fluid, and fragile. The Garden is thus a sentimental garden: an interior landscape in which one can lose oneself in search of new definitions.
Every garden is a physical manifestation of an idea of nature governed by humans: at once an expression of power, an aesthetic refuge, and a mirror of an era and its aspirations. Each culture, each historical period has shaped its gardens according to specific criteria and ideals: Zen gardens as places of meditation, Islamic gardens as anticipations of paradise, Renaissance gardens as geometries of order and knowledge. The garden in Merano has within itself the capacity to suggest a communion with nature. This is why the photographer does not merely document; he draws strength from evocation, from showing not what the garden is but how it might be experienced, perceived, and interiorized. The Garden stands in continuity with artistic traditions that have regarded the landscape not simply as an object to be represented but as a pretext for speaking about human experience, about the fragile and complex relationship between the individual and the world around them. One might think, for example, of another photographer, Josef Sudek (1896–1976), and his ability to magnify subjects filtered through his own sensitivity in the gardens of Prague.
Rauschkolb has said that the song The Garden by Einstürzende Neubauten repeatedly accompanied him throughout this work—like a mantra, a hypnotic melody. A “soundtrack” that testifies to the meditative quality of the project, which, again, neither explains nor describes, but rather opens a sensory threshold through which to enter the garden.
