26th International Garden Festival calls for design proposals, unveils the theme ‘Borders’

The International Garden Festival is launching a call for proposals to choose designers to create the new temporary gardens for the Festival’s 26th edition, which will open on June 20, 2025, on the site of Les Jardins de Métis | Reford Gardens, Canada. This year’s theme is “Borders” which invites designers to “rethink the notion of borders in today’s post-colonial context, and to transpose their reflections into a garden-environment that blurs disciplines, renegotiates preconceived ideas about the garden/landscape, and actively dialogues with the visitor.”
“Borders partition a whole, giving it a value of its own. Tangible without necessarily visible, they mark a distinction of state, nature and materiality. They ‘separate’ digital from analog, inside from outside, garden from expanse, landscape from geography. Sometimes fixed, rigid or more or less hermetic, they can also be porous, ambiguous or multiple. Constantly renegotiated, borders also act as passageways, places of encounter and exchange,” reads the Festival’s website.
Created by Marie-Josée Lacroix, Denis Lemieux, Philippe Poullaouec-Gonidec and Alexander Reford, the International Garden Festival is now the most important contemporary garden festival in North America. Since its first edition, almost 190 gardens have been presented at Grand-Métis and in extramural venues in Canada and abroad.
The Festival takes place on a site adjacent to the historic gardens. Each year, the event features about twenty creations by roughly 70 landscape architects, architects and designers from a variety of disciplines. Over the years, the Festival has been the recipient of several distinctions, including the Prix Hector-Fabre (2007), awarded every two years by the Minister of International Relations and Francophonie to an organization that has contributed to the international reputation of its region.
This call for entries is open to Canadian and international landscape architects, architects, visual artists and multidisciplinary teams.
Designers are invited to design a garden that can take place in one or other of the axes of the Festival. In collaboration with the designers, the artistic and technical committee of the Festival will then identify the site that will best showcase their project. They will be asked to imagine their garden for exhibition for at least two summers as well as propose strategies for the repurposing or recycling of the garden or its materials following the end of its exhibition.
The deadline for online submissions is Monday, November 4, 2024, At 5:00 p.m. EST.
Source: canadianarchitect.com