With his newly developed installation Garden of the Broken Hearted, Theo Eshetu creates a moment of contemplation allowing the viewer to confront the brutal realities that impact many people’s lives – realities that most of us consume at a distance on screens. It consists of a large olive tree placed on a rotating stage; a video is projected onto the tree, dematerialising it in the process.
Gardens are spaces for gathering – of plants as much as of people. But they can also be sites of unrooting, control and appropriation. The tree stands as a poetic reflection on impermanence. The tree resists its alienation from its homeland into the space of art: it holds on to life, even as it loses its leaves, longs for daylight and water, and is deprived of its nurturing and sheltering purpose and its place in a broader natural cycle. All the while, video footage of the tree, taken before its transportation to Venice, is projected onto it, conferring a sense of temporality, of life that extends toward both past and future. Garden of the Broken Hearted creates a space of mourning and melancholia as well as a peaceful refuge.
—Melanie Roumiguière
