Two Gardens
Arvo Leo
In front of Hotel Maria Kapel, on a site which has long been covered by pavement, artist Arvo Leo installed two urban gardens that provide a home for bees and other pollinating insects - thus contributing to the city’s biodiversity. Due to extensive urbanisation, more than half of the bee species in the Netherlands are threatened with extinction. This is cause for serious concern because almost 85% of our agriculture and horticulture depends on pollination. With this spatial intervention, Arvo investigates how an alternative ecology can emerge where humans and nature can coexist in better harmony.
The work Two Gardens came into being after his exhibition Sun Windows Moon Tendrils in 2019. For this project, Arvo brought the (in)famous sculpture The Lying Man on the ridge of the chapel to life by making him part of a story in which he removes the stones from HMK’s front garden and lowers them into the exhibition space. Visitors to the exhibition were then invited to carry the bricks with them and use them as barter for marijuana which was offered through a hole in the floor. In this way, a local ecology was created where every consecutive action was rewarded and of added value to both people and nature.
Arvo Leo says: “In 2019, I spent six months living in Hoorn, sleeping in HMK’s guesthouse but also in my tent inside the chapel. Over the months I learned about the city's history with the unicorn, the kinetic movements of the guillotine, the miraculous process of wine & bread transforming into blood & body, the brick as an object of creation and destruction, all the while continuing my ongoing research into the diversity of plants.
What resulted from this life-stew was the exhibition Sun Windows Moon Tendrils; an experimental flower trilogy which intertwines my recent projects on orchids and cannabis with a new work about butterfly gardens. Or the story could be that there was a man who lived on the roof who one day decided to begin lifting bricks out of the sidewalk using a long garbage tendril, while being assisted by a group of bats, fish, beets, and seaweed down below. The roof man would then lower the bricks down into the chapel space leaving them inside various ‘liquid-windows’. Eventually, visitors could pull a brick out of one of these liquid-windows and take it over to a hole in the floor where they could lower the brick down into the subterranean world at which point a cannabis flower would often rise up in exchange.”
As an aftermath to the project (but also as a key foundation) was the creation of two small permanent flower gardens on both sides of the buildings' entranceway. Since 2019 Arvo has been maintaining the gardens and taking care of these little spaces for the pollinating visitors of Hotel Maria Kapel.
Film: Arvo Leo, Two Gardens, 2019. As part of Sun Windows Moon Tendrils at HMK.
Bio: Arvo Leo
Arvo Leo (1981) is a Canadian artist and filmmaker who lives and works in the Netherlands. He makes interactive artworks, sculptures and absurdist films with an open ending. By translating landscapes, living and inanimate objects into moving images, Leo questions the relationship between everyday life and non-human worlds. He combines these concepts in playful and absurdist stories and surprising exchanges.
