Maria Thereza Alves

 
Land
Recipes for Survival
Communal
Destabilizers
Birds
Seeing you
Water
Utopia
We
Borders
Plants
X

Que Flui

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Que Flui, 2003

Site specific installation

Que Flui in Portuguese means “that which flows” and can be used both for liquid substances and for a conversation that goes well.

A glass table and two highly polished stone benches, (surfaces echoing transparency and reflection) are situated on the curve of a road in the mountain town of Matsunoyama and are easily visible and available to all passers-by.

Underneath the table flows an artificial stream, which the artist had made, providing participants direct access to the water (high concrete banks obstruct access to a nearby waterfall). Raw earth, recently excavated from the waterfall area surrounds Que Flui.

Landscape is an accumulation of events and histories. Que Flui, a public space site for conversations, allows for that accumulation on the raw earth to begin. It is a place-making. It is an on-going process for facilitating the direct encounter of the participant in the process of the formation of the Que Flui landscape. An inversion of the customary Japanese traditional landscaped garden which prioritizes only the human gaze instead of encounters with the land.

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