In 2021 a group of cultural workers together with tranzit.ro, bought together a plot of land 40 km. north of Bucharest, where we are building The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life. Amongst others, the Station aims to become a working place for artists and researchers interested in thinking a different relationship to nature. As such, we are striving to plant and maintain a garden that is responding to the challenges of climate change, which is paying attention to the local biodiversity and is at the same time permeable to metissage and cultural embedding. Cosmos Garden, drawing its name from the plant originating from Mexico, Cosmos bipinnatus, is proposed by landscape designer Georgiana Strat as “a living laboratory of experimentation for nature, art and life. The purpose is testing, observing and foregrounding of models that creatively answer to themes such as: the decrease of water resources, conservation of biodiversity, migration of plants and animal species, models of sustainable feeding, fighting desertification etc.” Georgiana Strat proposed a site analysis, a concept for the Cosmos Garden and a plan for the planting, and we presented these plans as part of the itinerating exhibition “Now the Impulse is to Live!”.

“The opaque is not the obscure.. it is that which cannot be reduced, which is the most perennial guarantee of participation and confluence” “We clamour for the right to opacity for everyone” Édouart Glissant When asked to describe the Floating University, as members of this multifaceted venture are often asked to do, the answer starts with an exhale and a pause, followed by a highly personal interpretation – the description of a shared experience as seen from a set of highly individualised viewpoints. That the Floating University allows for that level of complex communication of itself the fact there is no corporate script, that it is a deeply opaque infrastructure for each visitor to project onto, is the political essence of the project. The Floating University requires a new language of practice and perhaps a new practice all together. A practice that negates the institutional way of doing things, challenges the need for unified transparencies of meaning, elaborates on processes of making and thinking together and frees spaces in the city to do so collectively. image © Lena Giovanazzi Drawing by Jade Dreyfuss 2022 Source main image: ©Jean-Marie Dhur, Zabrieski Buchladen Source text: Floating University

Foret Primaire On the initiative of the botanist Francis Hallé, our association is working to create a vast area of European dimension and large surface area - about 70,000 hectares - in which an intact forest will evolve autonomously, renewing and developing its fauna and flora without any human intervention, and this over a period of several centuries. This area, which has yet to be located, will be cross-border, with a French base. Crédit Photos : Opération Canopée © Francis Hallé Des arbres dans la forêt primaire de Bialowieza (Pologne). (AFP) Source texte