“An elevated garden growing at the sound of falling water. A water recovery system, a garden contructed with the local biotope, a free social meeting space, an architecture to reflect on the element of water and its cultural and social resonances.” With this words French artist, Lucas Grandin, describes the project Le Jardin Sonore de Bonamouti made within the framework of the Salon Urbain de Douala (SUD), a tri-annual festival for public art designed and organized by Doual’art, center for contemporary art in Douala, Cameroon, in cooperation with ICU art projects.
At each triennial, a theme is selected to provide a framework for the artistic interventions and for this year’s SUD the guiding topic was ‘water’. Having grown from a couple of small villages on the banks of the Wouri river, Douala has always had an important relationship with water. Based on this, Grandin’s Jardin Sonore holds a direct relation to the city’s origins and present conditions : “this structure was made to reveal the why of the city of Douala: a water city where you can’t see or feel the water anywhere. Douala is a city where it rains in one hour what it rains in my country in one year, and where the rain is never recovered. ” Hence, through this structure the artist intends to offer the community a free meeting place in Bonamouti where people can regain conscience of the importance of water in their lives, “to give back Douala its right to water”. This is a space where people can go “to rest with the water’s melody, to smell the flowers, to see the Wouri river and its original mangrove, to feel the wind of nature... a new social area to talk, to plant, to listen, to re-create new inter-generational communication through the garden.”
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