Los jardines de la Ruta de la Seda

This summer, Casa Asia presents two projects in the Royal Botanical Gardens of Madrid. On the one hand, Un jardín zen negro (A Black Zen Garden), an installation built with ash from the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Island of La Palma, and, on the other, an exhibition project entitled La risa de las flores (The Laughter of Flowers) which brings together the work of fourteen Asian and Spanish artists who have carried out research into the culture of flowers in Asia. Complementing these two activities, as part of the Veranos de la Villa festival, a number of speakers and researchers will talk about the oriental gardens of the Silk Road on 8, 9 and 10 July at the Palacio de Fernán Núñez.

The philosopher and scientist Félix Ruiz de la Puerta will talk about the Japanese Garden; the poet Jesús Aguado will concentrate on the Gardens of India, where he lived for a number of years; and Cristina Cabañeros will talk about the Persian Garden; and last but not least, Professor José Manuel Almodóvar Melendo will discuss the Chinese Garden. Menene Gras Balaguer will present the garden as an earthly representation of paradise or a microcosm and imago mundi, retracing the Silk Route and other parallel routes such as the Rice Route or the Bamboo Route, to introduce the grammar of Oriental gardens understood as a cultural construction of the natural landscape.

In collaboration with Casa Asia and the Spanish Railway Foundation