Otterlo. The French artist Pierre Huyghe is planting a garden at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, in the Netherlands. La Saison des Fêtes (the holiday season) is a circular “calendar made of living organisms that are each associated with a particular ritual” or religious or secular holiday, Huyghe tells The Art Newspaper. The garden should open to the public at the end of June.
The installation, which is around 20m in diameter, will include flowers and trees, such as roses to mark St Valentine’s Day and a cherry blossom to represent the springtime Japanese cherry blossom festival of Hanami. These plants originated in different parts of the world, but over time have become widespread and “are now more related to when than where”, Huyghe says.
The museum, which has extensive grounds situated near the town of Otterlo in the middle of the Hoge Veluwe National Park, has acquired the work and plans to keep it installed in its current location for at least seven or eight years, says the institution’s director, Lisette Pelsers.
Both Pelsers and Huyghe say they are not sure how, when and to what extent the garden will be maintained or if the plants will be left to grow as they will. “I want to see entropy, I want to see conflict,” Huyghe says. “It’s always nice to not know exactly how things will end up,” he added.
