From the endless digression of Bad Utoquai — the public swimming area on Lake Zurich — to the powerless Seine watching the flames devour Notre-Dame de Paris, Walden X is far from a calm river. Through a series of stages that serve as points on the author’s mental map, this essay subtly unfolds a manifesto of landscape art according to Clément Willemin. Oscillating between horizons and axioms (“seduce rather than convince”), demonstrating absolute faith in experience (from body to territory), and weaving together ancient stories (the Garden of Eden, the Battle of Morat), personal anecdotes, aphorisms, and landscape and urban projects (Belleville park playground, Bas-Clichy urban renewal, etc.), this intriguing text offers far more than a vision of landscape: it sketches a landscape itself. It also illustrates the metonymic nature of the discipline: if the thought of landscape is a landscape, then landscape is also thought, and sensitive experience becomes a spiritual journey. The author presents landscape through a diagonal vision of a theater of social (mobility vs. immobility), political (directive vs. permissive), and philosophical stakes — a theater of unhindered experience, where pleasure meets attention to detail, and gender fluidity, when possible, is embraced. Unlike landscape urbanism, Willemin’s landscape knows no boundaries, no guiding lines, and hardly any continuity. From park to parking lot, from leisure to delight, Walden X traverses the slopes of an almost magical thought, alert to signals and resonances, seeking to create extraordinary places. Along the way, the text announces a practice that freely associates plan (ground) and section (strata), revealing a profoundly political program: each of us is a garden — let us cultivate it.
Publisher: Éditions AHA
Available in bookstores and on order: info@aha-paris.com
Price: €17
