Organizers:�Botanical City Inc, New York, USA, and The Maracaibo�s Botanical Garden Foundation, Zulia, Venezuela.
Date:� July 8th, 2015. Paris from 12:00 PM to 2:00 PM; Maracaibo from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM.
Location:� Place Jussieu, Paris, France and Maracaibo�s Botanical Garden, Zulia, Venezuela. .
Expected number of participants:� up to 150.
Nature of participants:� Public in general, artist, scientists, policymakers.
Keywords:� Ephemeral Landscapes, Botanical Garden, Botanical City, Public Space Adaptation.
Language: English and French in Paris; Spanish in Maracaibo.


Keynote Speakers

• F. Galletti, President, Fundaci�n Jard�n Bot�nico de Maracaibo, Maracaibo, Venezuela.
• O. Grauer, Visiting Professor, University of Pennsylvania, Landscape Architecture, Philadelphia, United States of America.
• M. Machado, Professor, Universidad del Zulia, School of Architecture, Maracaibo, Venezuela
• L. Pe�eranda, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art of Zulia, Maracaibo, Venezuela.
• C. Urbina, Professor, Universidad del Zulia, School of Architecture, Maracaibo, Venezuela.
• M. Villalobos, Founder Artist Creator, Botanical City Inc, New York, United States of America.
  

Collaborators

• L. Ararat, Photographer, Fundaci�n Jard�n Bot�nico de Maracaibo, Executive direction, Maracaibo, Venezuela.
• A. Belfort, Architect, TAB Lab, Architects, Paris, France.
• N. Bofill, Artist, Barcelona, Spain.
• L. Gom�z, Director, School of Fine Arts, Universidad del Zulia, School of Architecture, Maracaibo, Venezuela.
• D. Gouverneur, Professor in Practice, University of Pennsylvania, Landscape architecture, Philadelphia, United States of America.
• M. Gutierrez, Architect, Fundaci�n Jard�n Bot�nico de Maracaibo, Maracaibo, Venezuela.
• H. Pi�a, Bergen Kunsthall, Bergen, Norway.
• E. Poti�-Vivas, Paris, France.
  

Link to a website: http://www.botanicalcity.org/act.html

Contact:
[email protected]��� FB, Twitter and Instagram: @botanicalcity
+1 212 6990920, 244 5th Ave, suite 200, New York, NY 10001

Botanic gardens are institutions specially prepared to lead the discussion on climate change adaptation strategies as well as mitigation actions at the territorial, metropolitan and local scale. As a long lasting cultural landscape typology, the botanic gardens have offered remarkable contributions to our understanding of both biological behavior of plants through the management of their living collections and herbariums, as well as the encouragement and development of the visitor�s knowledge, awareness and interest in nature. Currently the botanical gardens continue to provide valuable insight on the relationship between temperature, flowering and leaf-out, climate and physiology, as well as evolutionary anatomic transformations. Our research began in the Botanical Garden of Maracaibo built by Roberto Burle Marx and Leandro Aristeguieta in 1983. Mainly committed to the preservation of the Dry Tropical Forest around the Maracaibo Lake, in the northwest region of Venezuela. This garden serves as a system of references toward a botanical urban landscape of a global relevance, especially in a moment when it is undeniably urgent to protect and preserve our environment and the ways in which we engage with it.
Click and learn more! http://www.botanicalcity.org/

The ephemeral landscape performative exercises focus on new strategies to address conflict resolution in the public space, while encouraging specific methodological recommendations to adapt and transform such spaces, in the context of a changing climate. Can performances help us to measure the invisible relationships between the individuals and the landscape? Can performances support long-term strategies of morphologic, programmatic and ecologic conflict resolution at the urban scale, by articulating the transition between �looking at� and �engaging with� approaches? This research aims to demonstrate how performances in the public space contribute to diversify the interaction between humans and nature. The research describes how the performances could:� a) induce new relations of reciprocity by breaking the established preconceptions around public behavior, b) capture imagination and curiosity from viewers, transforming viewers into actors and opening a deeper understanding of the uniqueness of the moment and, c) make visible the poetic and ethical dimensions of surfing throughout the open spaces as fields of relationships among heterogeneous living individuals. The research highlights the potential influence of performances as ephemeral landscapes to raise awareness about the importance of bridging not only social gaps, but also those between humans and nature and to understand the urban landscape as a network of representation and engagements that unfolds over time and moves toward new reciprocities that overcome our vulnerabilities.
Click and Live it! http://www.botanicalcity.org/be.html

The Paris Workshop took place at the Place Jussieu from 12:00PM to 2:00PM. This public space was identified as a perfect middle point between the University Campus Pierre et Marie Curie and the Jardins des Plantes. This location was meant to serve as a strong metaphor for a relevant encounter between educational and botanical landscapes of learning, preservation and dissemination. The Paris performance shared the same methodological structure with the performance in Maracaibo, it was structured in five simple steps: Discover, Plant, Grow, Be and Reproduce.

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In experiential terms, the participants brought to life an active botanical, physical and programmatic connection among the river, the Jardin des Plantes and the University. The blue fabric was moving with the wind; people passing by were reading the labels, discovering the species, imagining how the river could enter the garden, the campus and the square.

In specific terms, the two performances followed the same structure of five activities and the same theme, while preserving open the format and content of the actions and the outcomes in each location. In both instances, the performative research was there to provide the structure and the freedom to make legible and understandable both approaches: a) one that is synthetic, that compresses and summarizes and, b) one that is analytical, that expands and articulates.

Therefore, as researchers, the one key highlight we can offer is perhaps a methodological one. One that finds elements to encourage the research on methods of learning and engagement that moves beyond the oppositions between the scientific and the artistic. The �performative essence� of this study is not a subversive ambition against academic conventions; rather it is a true interest for understanding processes that intrinsically seek balance between what is of artistic power and that of scientific value, as it happens in Burle Marx and Aristeguieta�s Garden.

In such cases, practice is research, action equals theoretical findings, findings are products, and the acceptance of products leads to validation. Such paradigms transcend the systems of cause-effect deduction. Moving from �looking at� to �engaging with� approaches, the performative interventions entitled �Ephemeral Botanical Urban Landscape� became routine-breaking methodological tools, behaving as ephemeral landscapes of social encounter. This type of performance aims to capture what keeps us apart from public space and what and whom do we fear as a group of individuals, while navigating the public space.

Finally, the ephemeral performances offer the designers and scientists instant information that may influence the design process and policy making mechanisms, thus the way the sites may look and perform over time. Moving forward into the future exercises of this performative nature, have taken on the potential to analyze the applicability of the performances in relation to three different aspects: a) as a mechanism to evaluate design proposals, b) as a tool to influence the design process, and c) as a method to enhance the implementation of the proposals.

Please find the report of the event hereunder.