In the late 1990s, Sally Below was one of the initiators of the Temporary Gardens. You wrote at the time: “Gardens and landscapes are ideas, they arise as images in the mind. The Temporary Gardens play with these images. It is often the small interventions, the seemingly logical additions or breaks, that trigger longings, joy, give impetus to one’s own ideas and, in contrast to the fixed, fenced-in and protected by ordinances urban greenery, question old familiar habits”.
The Temporary Gardeners examined a site for its architectural, social and historical characteristics and then redesigned it for four summer days. They not only returned the gaze to areas of the city that had received little attention at the time, but also posed the question of how urban living space is perceived and what cultural understanding is accorded to it. The series ended with the Temporary Gardens in Aachen in 2008. It inspired many others to take similar actions.
