The International Garden Festival is launching a call for proposals to select designers to create the new temporary gardens for the Festival’s 24^th edition, which will open on June 23, 2023, on the site of Les Jardins de Métis / Reford Gardens. Building on the success of the past summer (where 60,000 visitors safely toured twenty-five garden installations on the theme of Adaptation), the Festival is seeking projects that explore the valorization, transmission and reactualization of traditional knowledge and savoir-faire. Racines / Roots is the theme to which we are inviting designers to respond with their proposals to imagine a present and a future that is ecologically, economically and culturally responsible by drawing on the teachings of past generations.

With the advent of the digital age, globalization and the rapid speed of technological advancement that are changing our relationship with time, the physical world and each other, Racines / Roots rejects the unrooted vision implanted by the industrial revolution to embrace an approach that seeks to be nourished from a common heritage. The theme counters the forces of homogenization that is part of globalization, incorporating the notion of globality coined by the Martinique poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant (1928-2011). It invites a return to what is essential by integrating the use of native plants, local materials – whether reused or with limited environmental impact –, as well as traditional methods of construction combined with a contemporary vision that embraces both regional communities and ecosystems. Racines | Roots intends to challenge the status quo and create innovative human scale environments. It seeks to transcend generations and disciplines.

The jury for the 2023 Festival will choose five projects from this call for proposals. Designers are invited to design a garden that can take place in one or other of the axes of the Festival. The artistic and technical committee of the Festival will identify, in collaboration with the designers, the site that will best showcase their project. Designers will be asked to imagine their garden for exhibition for at least two summers and to propose strategies for the repurposing or recycling of the garden or its materials after the end of its exhibition.