What does a garden mean? Shayari de Silva, chief curator of the Geoffrey Bawa Trust in Colombo, expounds on the significance of Lunuganga — the Sri Lankan architect’s beloved creation and oasis. De Silva speaks to us at the end of this year’s Lunuganga’s Summer programme.
FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ Could you maybe start by exploring the value and role of the garden for the Geoffrey Bawa Trust?
SHAYARI DE SILVA Lunuganga is one of the most important assets of the Trust — and I use that word evoking every sense of it. We can speculate that it was perhaps Bawa’s most valued creation — it’s the only project on which he chose to make a book, and in the deeds for the Geoffrey Bawa and Lunuganga Trusts he elaborates in great detail how he hopes the garden might be cared for and used, following his passing. It is also the primary way in which we support ourselves. As a non-profit institution in a developing country, with no state support for cultural activities and a very nascent patronage culture, the Trust has steered through multiple political and economic crises by opening Lunuganga for tours and stays. This approach has given us a degree of autonomy and allowed us to conserve and maintain the premises.
It prompts an agility that is incredibly valuable in defining our curatorial and museum practices from first principles — asking what steers us, and who our communities are, without simply inheriting the mantles of museums and archives elsewhere.
Curatorially, it is a point of focus as well — we periodically invite highly regarded artists to make site-specific installations in the garden, drawing from its long history of artists and makers being inspired by the space and adding to it. Considering what it means to have a garden — and not just buildings and objects — in our holdings has been an incredible lens for considering how we define what constitutes our archives and collections, allowing us to extend these definitions to consider the garden as part of the archive and even the flora and living collections as being under our care. It prompts an agility that is incredibly valuable in defining our curatorial and museum practices from first principles — asking what steers us, and who our communities are, without simply inheriting the mantles of museums and archives elsewhere.
KOOZ On occasion of its 75th anniversary, you are using the garden as a lens for engagement to explore the intertwining of art and ecology. Where has this guided you over the last year?
SDS Conceptually, this has allowed us to navigate many open-ended paths, similar to how one might meander through a garden. Lunuganga was a testing ground for Bawa, and so too for our curatorial team as we explored different activities with various tempos, rhythms, and outcomes that formed a collective whole — to think about gardens is to think about time. This was important for us as we nurture a team of museum professionals in a country where there are very few — the To Lunuganga programme was an opportunity for each of us to try ideas and curatorial projects that were not confined to outcomes within a walled space. This led to sonic, aural and culinary investigations as much as artistic responses and archival exhibitions, and we realised as an institution how much we value our agency as a listening ear for polyphonic voices. A series of podcasts called Tree Talks explored the interplay of cultural and arboreal life in the garden. An installation called The Order of Nature explored the garden as a queer space, which navigated the country’s outdated laws and the privacy of individual biographies in tandem with counter-mapping workshops and detours.
Lunuganga was a testing ground for Bawa, and so too for our curatorial team as we explored different activities with various tempos, rhythms, and outcomes that formed a collective whole — to think about gardens is to think about time.
The garden as a lens has allowed us to develop curatorial practices which are centred on introspection and questioning, which I believe is an extremely valuable approach to have in these times of ecological and political urgency. Our activities at Lunuganga are necessarily governed by the monsoon seasons and we decided to embrace this in structuring the programme, which essentially spans three monsoons. Once we submitted to the cycles of nature, we were in fact freed in many ways to develop meaningful calendars that respected what was possible and suggested to us when things should happen.
The garden as a lens has allowed us to develop curatorial practices which are centred on introspection and questioning, which I believe is an extremely valuable approach to have in these times of ecological and political urgency.
KOOZ Running from May to December 2024, Season Three is the closing chapter of this project. How will this season reflect on Lunuganga as a place of ecological importance whilst highlighting the significance of local knowledge, traditions and rituals that relate to the garden and its greater context?
SDS Each monsoon season allowed us to work in different ways; initially we had thought that the first season might be one of beginnings: starting projects, building relationships and creating communities, the second might be one of gestation: focusing on discourse and development and the third a sort of harvest – where we would see all the outcomes of our work. But in fact, the garden showed us that every season has its beginnings and ends, its moments of gathering and learning. Fundamental to the idea of time in a garden is that there are many times — a range of rhythms and cycles. And although this is the last season of our programme, we’ve realised it’s a moment in a cycle of work that will continue in the garden. So, while we will use the gatherings of the season as moments to reflect on the harvests of work like the biodiversity study being undertaken by the University of Peradeniya and the genetical study of the hog deer on Honduwa Island (part of Lunuganga) carried out by the University of Sri Jayawardenapura, the work itself will continue, which in many ways has been the best outcome for us.
Our programme, which kicks off in Colombo and then moves to the garden for the weekend, comprises many elements which highlight and open up our most recent projects; an installation at the former Ena de Silva house by Bawa (which was moved from Colombo to a site adjacent to the garden in order to be preserved from demolition)will look at Ena and the constellation of makers she worked, particularly her son Anil Gamini Jayasuriya, and their deep interest in the natural world which was a primary muse for their batik practice. Similarly, renowned Sri Lankan musician and dancer Ravibandu Vidhyapathi will perform an arrangement of a soundtrack he wrote two decades ago for a film on the garden, Salt River, which draws from traditional music of the island. The podcast series Tree Talks continues, with a focus on local knowledge, traditions, and rituals as they coincide with trees — we will create a listening room for this material in Colombo as we explore ways of experiencing the garden from afar this season.
KOOZ Beyond the local, the programme also expands to international scholars and institutions — what is the value of these geographical contaminations and exchanges?
SDS As an island, Sri Lanka has been influenced in myriad ways by the forces and beings that the winds have brought across in all directions — immediately manifest when one looks at a garden like Lunuganga, and the different origins of both its flora and fauna but also its building elements and collection of art. So, it was very important to us in defining this programme that we do it in a way that is rooted and local but also intertwined with elective affinities. So for example, with the artists we invited to respond to the work in the garden — Indian artist Reena Kallat and Sri Lankan artist Firi Rahman — they each have different interests and different trajectories but a deeply considered exploration of our relationship as humans with nature runs through both of their practices. We were also struck by the parallels that can be drawn in the importance of garden-making to the practices of Isamu Noguchi, Roberto Burle Marx and Geoffrey Bawa that gave rise to a series of conversations and ongoing explorations between each of the institutions working with these legacies. The similarities between them help tease apart the nuances and specificities, which we believe to be a key outcome.
KOOZ The programme is structured as an intensely participatory process. What thoughts and seeds do you hope to have planted?
SDS Thank you for asking this — in crafting this project, we were very attuned to the dynamics between curators and communities, and we felt it was opportune project for us to explore what it meant to be participatory as a cultural institution, partly due to the long duration of To Lunuganga which would support such an investigation. Our previous exhibitions, like It is Essential to be There, on the Bawa drawing archives, relied on a type of expertise of subject matter by the curators – with To Lunuganga we wanted to extend this idea of expertise to uncover the many kinds of knowledge held by people and how we could have cross-currents of knowledge and exchange. So we stepped away from the curators of the Trust defining everything; instead our whole team, including colleagues from Programmes, Design and Communications Departments all were involved in crafting the programme. These programmes themselves sought alternative methodologies — as detours, counter-maps and open houses — so we could explore the questions driving the programme collectively, with our audiences. Ultimately, I think we have explored many pathways for curatorial practice and many ways of knowing and realised that we value the vast variety of intelligences a good gardener requires — scientific, aesthetic, intuitive, and sensorial, to name a few of these. We do not feel that the way forward is more defined, only wider and more open than we realised when we started.
Bios
Shayari de Silva is trained as an architect and focuses on curatorial and editorial projects. Since 2018, she has overseen the programmes around exhibition, publication and conservation at the Geoffrey Bawa Trust, where she is currently the chief curator. Recent exhibitions include ‘The Gift: five site-specific installations at Bawa’s garden, Lunuganga’, by Kengo Kuma, Lee Mingwei, Dominic Sansoni, Dayanita Singh and Chandragupta Thenuwara, as part of the Bawa 100 Centennial Celebration; ‘To Lunuganga’, celebrating 75 years of art, architecture, and ecology at Geoffrey Bawa's garden, and ‘It is Essential to be There’ the first exhibition to draw from the Geoffrey Bawa Archives. Shayari co-edited Perspecta 51: Medium (MIT Press: 2018) and edited Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archive (Lars Müller: 2023).
Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and storyteller whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2022 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.
