Made in Mirrors

‘I crossed the ocean to visit a park which is more fiction than reality. I lost grip of the facts trying to understand its history. The more I tried to describe and document it, the more diffuse the park’s identity became. By now, the park must have disappeared from the earth’s surface.’ Maria Barnas

Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) turned out his first landscape designs in Recife, Brazil. Amongst these was Praça Euclides da Cunha (1935), a park inspired by Euclides da Cunha's novel Rebellion in the Backlands (1902). The novel describes the civil war (1893 -1897) between the Republic and a group of some 30,000 monarchists.

The parks and gardens of the Brazilian landscape artist Burle Marx, are places to think and places where thoughts have their place, both analytical and intuitive. For his park, based on Rebellion in the Backlands, Burle Marx used succulents and cacti from Bahia, bringing not only a dry and neglected area into the centre of Recife, but also a traumatic history.

The original plan for the park was not adhered to. Fruit trees appeared where Burle Marx had not imagined them. No original construction drawings of the park can be found. The reconstruction that took place in 2004 was not based on the original design by Burle Marx, but on interpretations of a single sketch and memories.

Barnas made an animation based on photos of Burle Marx’s gardens taken from books, photo’s of the cacti he used and real cacti. It was from this material that Barnas created photographs and short film clips. What she aims to show is that a place is not just a physical space, but also a metaphor for the need to preserve history and, primarily, to distort it. 'For that reason I’m interested mainly in the fiction that comes about when someone tries to give form to history ', Barnas explains.