The garden as hortus conclusus is the result of a selection of comforting elements from the plant world. 'Other' natures are excluded, such as the difficult ecosystems where life is forced to compromise. If the garden has always abstracted man's inner world, including hostile nature in the garden allows to contemplate a liminal, complex and tenacious form of nature, capable of a biological compromise that seems impossible for man today.

In this sense the garden becomes a reflection on the way we look at reality: Sicily, a land of harsh environmental and visual contrasts, alternates fertile cultivated areas with woods, rocky cliffs, gullies and other extreme habitats. 

Among these, the project presents two of them: volcanic habitats and those of brackish lagoons. Despite their hostile conditions, some peculiar plant communities are able to colonise these types of substrates, developing their own biological form in line with the difficulty of the habitat. The two substrates are represented by two mounds that define a nature in transition, where there is no boundary, but rather a set of changing spaces. Having rethought its founding spatial canons, the garden becomes an ambiguous space: it leaves margins for interpretation, beyond the functional or aesthetic catalogues in which we often categorise what surrounds us.

With Joseph Rigo and Salvatore Cambria.