Matteo Bozzi - Elementary Gardens

'Reflective Skin', 2024 (acoustic foil, wool thread, pvc pipes)

Elementary Gardens interrogates the metaphorical resonance of gardens as spaces of introspection and relational dynamics. Inspired by the medieval Hortus Conclusus and Foucault’s concept of heterotopic spaces, the project reimagines gardens as sites for social and spatial experimentation. Lightweight, mobile sculptural devices made from repurposed materials serve as uncanny, relational objects, blurring the boundaries between architecture and the human body. Matteo’s practice navigates the tension between body and space, challenging how architecture conditions human interaction.

Still image from 'Elementary Gardens I', 2024

The skins function as performative objects and ephemeral architectures—worn, moved, and inhabited to prompt new ways of relating to space and each other. Through site-specific, action-oriented interventions, the work questions conventional spatial hierarchies, uncovering the latent politics of space and revealing how spatial boundaries condition movement, agency, and power relations. The skins offer a form of spatial resistance, wherein the body, through its movement and actions, contests the authority of established systems of space and order. They become tools for rewriting spatial narratives.

Script for a performative activation, 2024

Richard Serra's Verb List, 1967

Still from 'Elementary Gardens II', 2024, video duration 06:33

Repurposed materials like wool, rubber, reflective foil, and bubble wrap are chosen for their unique properties—wool’s warmth promotes closeness, rubber’s grip grounds movement, foil isolates sound, and bubble wrap encourages play. Each material guides interactions with the skins, bridging body and environment to create a more intimate, body-centric experience of space.

The performative activations follow an iterative process: in the first trial, a single skin in a garden invites small-scale, intimate interactions among ten participants; in the second, another skin mobilises ten people in an urban setting, exploring the dynamics of public space. The final trial scales up with multiple skins and thirty participants performing actions inspired by Richard Serra’s verb list—hide, wrap, reveal, enclose, and more—to reshape their surroundings. Set in a park and captured on film, this performance unfolds as an unobserved play, generating ephemeral architectures that morph into new spatial landscapes.

Rather than being site-specific, Elementary Gardens proposes a flexible, site-adaptable methodology that challenges traditional modes of architectural production. It opens new possibilities for experiencing space by emphasising relational qualities and spatial politics. Elementary Gardens merges the personal and collective, the intimate and the political, offering a poetic yet incisive reflection on the possibilities of relational space.