Baldassarre Ruspoli

In The Coin, a recent novel by Yasmine Zaher, an unnamed narrator cultivates a garden inside her cramped New York City apartment. An emigre, she feels disconnected from her new land, so she buys bags of dirt and walks all over the city sourcing unusual plants. The antic garden she cultivates conjures the lost garden of her Palestinian grandmother; it is also a place of untrammeled growth, wildness, and ultimately, freedom. “No, my apartment wasn’t dirty. Nature is clean. It’s civilization that’s dirty,” she wryly observes.

Not dissimilarly, George Orwell, the hallowed prophet of totalitarianism, once espoused the wonders of gardening as a bulwark against hopelessness—an investment in the future. Orwell, who wrote about gardening in a 1944 essay called “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” loved to grow roses in particular.

And yet the origins of the garden tell a different story. The term “garden” hails from the Anglo-French word gardin, or “enclosure.” In ancient Japan, gardens were erected for the pleasure of emperors. In 17th century France, gardeners snipped and pruned and shaped, making horticulture a high art. In English, the word “paradise” is derived from Avestan, an ancient Iranian tongue in which the term evokes a “walled garden.” The oldest Persian garden for which there are records belonged to Cyrus the Great and was distinguished by its geometrical shape and cypress, pomegranate, and cherry trees.

All of which is to say, across history, the garden, while ostensibly idyllic and full of world-changing metaphorical vim, suggests a rarefied, exclusive, closed space—a space entangled with power, characterized by strenuous planning and control.

It is this double nature of the garden that animates a new work by the artist Baldassare Ruspoli.

Improbably, Ruspoli has conjured a garden of his own in an abandoned stable perched atop a mountain in the Swiss alps. While abstract, the garden remains vivid: a stainless steel ring encloses a single beam in the stable, dividing the space into two. The ring, an ellipse, doubles as a border. Not far away, in a corner, a human-sized plant looms, a 3d bronze-cast facsimile of a hollyhock, a goofy-looking species whose flowers only bloom only part of the year. Invasive by nature, the hollyhock stoops ever so slightly, as if eavesdropping. Its positioning some distance from the ring creates a productive confusion around notions of “inside” and “out”.

Mercurial music, meanwhile, permeates the space. These are subtle, irregular, even jarring sounds made by manipulating the ring—by mouth, violin bow, and rubber mallet among sundry other things—in collaboration with the artist Jacob Ott. But the sounds, it should be said, have undergone a journey; recorded in the gallery, they’ve been played in a faraway valley, recorded anew, and then played back in the gallery space. A parable for art: while the sculpture doesn’t travel, its resonances can—its texture inflected by each new encounter with the world.

Perhaps most crucially, the ring doubles as a mirror. Using sandpaper, Ruspoli has polished its surface over and over again—a laborious process of removal which renders the steel shiny and reflective. In this way, viewers can lean over and see both themselves and the space within its bounds. Inside or outside, paradise or prison, the ring implicates you—the viewer—in its bespoke spatial politics.

Text by Negar Azimi.