Sidewalk Ponds

Sidewalk ponds | Photographs

Art without artists | Gardens without landscape architects | Multiplicity

Plastic bottles, containers, buckets, and tin cans are used everywhere to collect excess water from air-conditioners. The purified lucid water fills these containers to the brim, overflowing onto the sidewalk.

Water | Flora | Garden | Ephemerality

The water's movement creates circular ripples. The delicate sound of dripping is barely heard through the city hustle, it makes you stop and listen. The water creates isles of life in places it did not exist before. These ponds spot the cityscape with intense color, becoming part of the enduring order of the city's open space.

Faded yellowish-green weeds, intense bright green moss, the wild and ferocious Ficus Religiosa and Nicotiana Glauca, all flourish – in spite of the harsh conditions – thanks to water from the sidewalk ponds.

While ponds and fountains constitute the heart of the garden and one of its highlights, I regard these sidewalk ponds as miniature mobile water gardens set in the urban environment. This hermeneutic concept perceives streets, passages, and other urban spaces as a contemporary garden, one made up from a chain of mini-fountains located on city streets, shops, restaurants, and building entrances.

This concept refers to the grotesque fountains of the Renaissance and Baroque garden along with contemporary new-urbanism theories which emphasize sustainability, community, and personalization of public spaces.

Sidewalk ponds are as much a part of summer as natural puddles are of winter; a source of seasonal renewable life. The garden is as expendable as the containers themselves which are discarded when they decay or are no longer necessary. While some of the flora would have already rooted, some will vanish, until next spring.

Art without Artists

Sidewalk ponds are environmental ephemeral site specific installations. It is an unknowingly practical virtuosic intervention in the site/environment. This is a dual use of the ready-made idea: first a secondary, ecological use of the containers, next, a hermeneutic interpretation of the practical solution as a work of art, site specific installation, a garden.

Sidewalk Ponds and the Multiplicity

The diversity of this phenomenon enables me to interpret it also as an extension of multiplicity. Multiplicity is not the multiplication of something, or a lot of the same thing. The multitude, an evasive idea, is a significant category in the post-modern, philosophical, and critical discourses. Interpreting sidewalk ponds as a phenomenon of multiplicity bears a post-modern attitude that wishes to highlight the various means of subjective expression that materialize when people intervene with their environment and enrich the urban texture.

In this documentary project I wish to point out the beauty of multiplicity in its diversity and entropy. Leaving sidewalk ponds unorganized and un-designed – as opposed to inventing some overdesigned industrial architectonic solution – is to show them as poetic situations, representing life, creativity, and personification, and thus to enable us the freedom of innovation.

Tags: garden, water garden, ponds, air-condition water, art, site specific installation, landscape-urbanism, baroque and renaissance garden, grotesque, art without artists, multiplicity.