Location: a wood, dark and threatening; rifle shots can be heard. A group of people is rambling around, they appear to be escaping. It is a cyclic journey, starting in the early morning and continuing until deep into the night. The longer the journey goes on, the more forbidding the mood becomes. Sometimes there are fights for food or water. A journey doomed to failure, whereby, just as in the legend of Saint Francis, the animals start to talk to the people. In the woods the group is walking in a twilight zone from life to eternity.

Le Jardin secret is a 4 channel video installation, providing the possibility of breaking into the story by means of a light-up tile. One computer controls the image and the (4 channel) sound. The visitor is surrounded by 4 projections, each of which is 5m wide. An important role is played by the animals, which are filmed as animations in this installation, such as a deer, swarms of bees, aggressive birds, a herd of swine and a bird of prey that rescues them. One of the actors is a falconer with his own birds of prey.

Underneath this artificial world is another, second, parallel world; this can be launched by activating a tile that lights up at this point. The trigger moments are indicated by mist appearing on all the screens. At this point the visitor is able to activate a mini drama. At the end of this plot the picture automatically returns to the wandering around in the woods.

This openness in the system means that a new context is continually created. Once night has changed to early morning the survivors start walking again and cut their way through to an enormous, grey plain, which seems to be a refuse dump, inhabited by aggressive seagulls that start to attack the rest of the group. This is the end of the cycle, which then begins again.

Lydia Schouten september 2006