NATURATA

Graciela Iturbide
NATURATA

Photographs: Graciela Iturbide

Text: Fabio Morabito

Publisher: Toluca Éditions + Lopez Quiroga Galeria

37 pages

Year: 2004

Price: 300 €

Comments: Illustrated hardcover,29 x 29 cm, First edition. B&w photographs. Text in Spanish and French. Design by Olivier Andreotti. In very good condition.

When Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden and had to live on their own, far from the delights God had lavished on them, did they long for another garden, or did they simply find the idea unbearable? Perhaps, after refusing all their lives to possess one, tormented by the memory of the serpent. already old, full of experience, knowledge, pain and a few rare pleasures, they gave in to the temptation to recreate their first sojourn and granted themselves a garden, which, however modest, must have reminded them, like nothing else in the world, of the innocent and luminous days of the beginning. Perhaps only then, looking at themselves in this second garden made with their own hands, did they truly know themselves, and accept their destiny. Perhaps, for the first time, they moved from complicity to love, or at least to affection? What was this second garden, a vague and imperfect reminder of the Edenic one? Small, to begin with, that you could embrace with a single glance, and monotonous, unable, with its plants crudely aligned or gracelessly scattered, to detach itself completely from the neighboring vegetable garden and orchard, and yet, already, a real garden, with that je ne sais quoi of the winged and gratuitous that all gardens have, which rests on an intimate connection with the sky, with that which we cannot reach. A garden is always being worked on and repaired, never leaving the slipway, never ready for fitting out. Only the Edenic garden is complete, finished in every nook and cranny. All gardens tend towards it, each in its own way and style; in them, unlike it, the struggle with the serpent is not waged once and for all, but is continuous, diffuse, daily, and its success is uncertain.