What is paradise for?
From garden to landscape – 7 Conversations and Reveries
Event Slider
Date
- 18:00 / Cancelled 18:00 / Sold out 18:00 – 20:00
- 18:00 / Cancelled 18:00 / Sold out 18:00 – 20:00
- 18:00 / Cancelled 18:00 / Sold out 18:00 – 20:00
- 18:00 / Cancelled 18:00 / Sold out 18:00 – 20:00
- 18:00 / Cancelled 18:00 / Sold out 18:00 – 20:00
- 18:00 / Cancelled 18:00 / Sold out 18:00 – 20:00
Location
Room 2Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Following two previous courses dedicated to the Garden and the Landscape, this new course offers seven sessions to reflect on Paradise as an idea, a garden, and a landscape.
Since the beginning of time, humanity has dreamed of Paradise – an ideal place, lost or yet to be found; a space of fullness, beauty, and balance.
Over time, this concept has been built, rebuilt, and reinterpreted in various forms: gardens, landscapes, myths, art, philosophy.
Paradise lives in the collective imagination as a deep desire, an ancestral memory, or a future utopia. Whether in the hands of kings or in the hearts of ordinary people, it has been drawn, sung, painted, and dreamed as a symbol of harmony between humans and nature.
This course is a journey through memory, art, culture, and landscape politics.
Each session is independent. Some sessions may include a visit to the garden. Participants should wear appropriate clothing and footwear.
Programme
In search of paradise
Before we can find Paradise, we need to understand what it represents. The first conversation invites us to search – a journey through languages, myths, and meanings.
How do we walk towards Paradise? This search crosses etymology, philosophy, religion, utopias. Humanity has always dreamed of happy places. A vital journey toward understanding this space that is intrinsic to our humanity.
Entering paradise
What marks the entrance to Paradise? Where does this sacred – physical or symbolic – place begin? Here, we reflect on the first human gestures that gave shape to the dream of Paradise.
Long before cities or gardens, choosing the path was already essential. As hunters and gatherers moved through the land, they traced sacred routes. Rock paintings, megalithic monuments, and the spaces between sky and earth marked the beginning of this search. What paths are we tracing today?
Inside paradise
Entering Paradise also means putting down roots. The third session explores permanence: building a place, caring for it, and creating a space that welcomes us.
When a seed is sown in the earth, more than a plant is born – an inhabited territory emerges. Humanity learns from nature and preserves the place that offers both physical and spiritual nourishment. This is how gardens and landscapes arise: spaces where we live, produce, protect, and contemplate. What places do we inhabit today with that same depth?
Still inside paradise
In this session, we dive into beauty. We explore how sensitivity transforms space into art – and how the gaze shapes the garden as a living artwork.
Once survival is secured, enchantment follows. The tilled earth, the sound of water, the shade, the scent, the rhythms of vegetation – everything becomes raw material for creation. Sarah Affonso traded paint for soil and embroidered the world with nature. Other artists and gardeners also elevated the garden to an aesthetic expression. What is the artistic dimension of our resting spaces today?
Still inside
Paradise is not just a natural space – it can also be political, social, collective. In this session, we discuss the garden as a space of inclusion, freedom, and equality.
When social order aligns with nature, the garden ceases to be private and becomes public. Paradise becomes a shared landscape – a space for freedom and citizenship. A garden that mirrors natural harmony and inspires the building of a more just society. Is this still the role of our gardens and landscapes today?
Paradise beyond limits
At the end of this journey, we look at Paradise today – a concept that has become even denser and more challenging in the contemporary world.
The theme “Paradise, Now” represented Portugal at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. More than an ideal, Paradise today is a field for reflecting on ethics, ecology, and coexistence. Michel Serres proposed a “natural contract” – a pact between humans and the planet. Are today’s gardens and landscapes following that path? Are they projects of integration, harmony, global vision, as proposed by Edgar Morin and Pope Francis?
Paradise as garden
In the seventh session, we rest.
We rest in the garden. We wander. We contemplate. We seek the pauses, the secrets, the Paradise it contains, and the personal paradises of each participant. We leave Paradise outside and reflect on the paradises within the room that hosted us throughout these 7 sessions.
Credits
Concept and direction
Aurora Carapinha