If you took a walk in Kassel's Karlsaue gardens during Documenta11 you were likely to come upon Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's park within the park. The artist had made a composition out of different architectural elements used in the design of modern parks; a scenario that, even though it blended in with its pastoral surroundings, seemed strangely out of place in these 18th-century manorial gardens. Rather, it had a modern atmosphere of a place somewhere in a Mediterranean or tropical climate.

The components of this environment were: a palm tree; an agave; a rose bush; a large lump of lava rock; a light-blue, flat, oval pool; a folding chair; a lamp post; a pink bench; a spherical, blue telephone box with the logo 'Telemar'; a field of square concrete tiles set into the lawn in a chessboard pattern; a path made of tiles; a long row of small stones; and a modernist windowless pavilion made of plain concrete and dynamically shaped due to the acute angles of its geometric outlines. The pavilion had a light box on one side (showing a graphic map of the park) and a transparent screen onto which a film was projected from the inside of the building. The film, which could only be discerned after dark, consisted of a montage of images from the park scenario itself cross-faded with sequences from films such as Antonioni's La Notte or Blow Up in which actors either perform against the backdrop of a park or cool, modernist architecture.

The most striking aspect of the park environment was that it could be instantly grasped as a coherent whole despite the fact that it consisted of more-or-less unrelated elements scattered across a plain strip of lawn with no demarcated boundaries. The atmosphere evoked by the different architectural props produced this feeling of coherence. They gave you a sense of place - a place that felt both modern and tropical. The choice to define a site solely through the creation of an atmosphere seems significant in this context, since this mode of definition is completely contrary to the standard modernist principle of organising space. The rationalist demarcation and utilitarian administration of space was epitomised through the structure of the grid as the axiom of modernist architecture and urban planning. In contrast, the park environment by Gonzalez-Foerster could be perceived as an atmospheric spatial continuum distinguished by the perceptible absence of the grid.

The sensation of entering an open continuum was related not only to the spatial but also the temporal dimensions of the environment. It felt as if the strip of park was in a time zone of its own where the distinction between past and future was blurred and where the aura of historicity generated a promise of futurity. On the one hand, you could take the park for an open-air museum with exhibits plucked from paradigmatic cases of modernist cityscapes or mythic holiday resorts such as Brazil, the Copacabana, Mediterranean promenades or Corbusier's garden architecture in Chandigarh. Objects as the ones found in the park certainly produce involuntary flashes of memory fuelled by personal recollections, as well as generic fantasies shaped by postcards, coffee-table books, art films and B-movies. On the other hand, the park could be seen as a design proposition filled with architectural modules designated for future use in garden redevelopment schemes around the world. Standing there, you had the gut feeling good modernist design gives you a sense of freedom along with the uplifting confidence that it may actually be possible to make things look and work better. The experience of time in Gonzalez-Foerster's park was thus equally characterised by a diffuse sense of a mediated past and the lingering promise of a brighter future. Similar to the way the composition of the park as a spatial continuum contradicted the structural logic of the modernist grid, the sensation of a temporal continuum (in relation to the historic legacy and future promise of the exhibit's design) opposed the modernist conception of modernity as linear progress. So the coup Gonzalez-Foerster performed in her piece was to display elements from the aesthetic vocabulary of modernist park architecture in a context in which the specific rationality of modernist space and time was suspended in a spatio-temporal continuum.

How then, as a viewer, do you navigate within this continuum? It seems that one prime principle of orientation was the emotional responses and memories triggered by the individual architectural props and the atmosphere of the overall scenario. A second principle could be found in the way in which the viewer was invited to relate to the park as an image. As a scenario, the park appears to be composed like a visual surface, a display that can be viewed from different perspectives. This aspect was emphasised, of course, by the fact that the park was pictured in the light box on the pavilion, and again reappears as a moving picture in the video projection within the pavilion. A third principle could be seen in the need to get a clear picture of the park only by moving through it. The movement of the viewer was essential because it was by looking at the objects from different perspectives that you got a sense of the overall composition. If you combine these three principles you might say the perception demanded by the park scenario was essentially cinematic - if the term 'cinematic' (to provide an impromptu definition) is to stand for a string of atmospheric images animated by movement.

In various regards this approach differs from other critical takes on modernity. Gonzalez-Foerster does not conceive modernity as a hegemonic discourse that needs to be delegitimised and dismantled. The fragments of modernist architecture she restages are no ciphers of authority. The piece does not seek to invoke and exorcise the power politics of modernism. Neither does it discuss modernity as a social fact. Gonzalez-Foerster does not provide data to document the harsh urban realities produced by modern architecture or demonstrate that the emancipatory project of modernity has failed. Her approach thus differs from practices that seek to ground modernity by exposing its hidden agenda, its power politics and the discontents of the social reality it has produced. Instead she augments the ungrounding of modernity by offering up for individual consumption fragments of its aesthetic legacy as atmospheric images charged with memories, dreams and promises. Her approach does not compete with other critical projects, rather it seems to presuppose the accomplishments of postmodern and post-colonial critique - and to propose ways of putting fragments of modernity up for possible reinterpretation.

These interpretations might be personal, romantic or, as the title A Plan for Escape suggests, positively escapist. Yet at the same time the focus of the piece on the atmosphere and aesthetics of 'tropicality' points towards a historic re-evaluation of modern architecture in the light of its intimate link with the design of cities in tropical climates. It is precisely the dense atmosphere of the park environment that makes the viewer experience this link with tropicality as intrinsic to the logic of modernism. You could say that this is the bottom line of the experience the park offers - it fuses a sense of modernity with a sense of tropicality in a single sensation.

Consequently the park scenario projects an alternative image to the commonly reductive account that portrays the brutalist utilitarian rationale of concrete high-rise colonies as the essence of the modernist project. Gonzalez- Foerster highlights the generous, playful and positive-minded 'tropical' spirit that is part of the historic truth of modernist architecture. In a similar vein Alberto Sartoris (godfather of Italian modernism) argued that the Northeners of the Bauhaus stole the idea and corrupted the soul of what was an essentially Mediterranean modern architecture.¹ However, this alternative interpretation is not made explicit in any discourse around the park. Rather it is experienced like a mood swing that suddenly makes things appear in a different light.

In this sense it appears to be crucial to the piece that it orchestrates a specific mood or atmosphere through the precise choice and placement of architectural props while also leaving it to viewers to interpret their experience and draw conclusions. This semantic openness seems to result from the 'cinematic' nature of the park environment. As the aesthetics, history and promise of modernist architecture are presented, or rather condensed into an image as a three-dimensional tableau, what counts is the impression the park makes on the viewer, rather than the identity of the individual architectural elements. Of course one could decipher the references and trace single objects back to their original urban context in Rio, Acapulco or Mexico City. But clearly this is not the point. What seems to be at stake in the piece is the creation of a situation in which possible new interpretations can arise from the stream of memory and projection, triggered by the conversion of a specific type of architecture into a cinematic scenario.

Joan Ramón Resina has recently introduced (that is redefined) the concept of the 'after-image' as a theoretical term to describe precisely this process in which architecture as an image creates meaning by appealing to memory.² Resina assumes that in our media-saturated culture '[the] image of the contemporary city is not only mediated by a variety of communications media but actually emerges from them.'³ From this assumption, however, he does not infer that we perceive urban environments solely as self-contained simulacra, perfect image-worlds fabricated by the cultural industries. Instead he argues that it is in the nature of the image that its meaning is unstable because its relation towards its referent - in this case the historical reality of the city - persists and always remains open to negotiation. Resina thus defines the image as 'after-image' as follows:

An image is always after itself, in the sense that it tries to catch up to its
referent, but also in the sense that a gap, whether physical, psychological,
or cultural (or a combination of all three), always separates the sensation
from its resolution and verification. Through this gap, meanings enter (or come
out of) the image by virtue of a process of hermeneutic amplification.⁴

This relatively uncontrolled oscillation of meaning between the city as image and the city as referent is particularly strong when memory comes into play. Resina concludes: 'By pitting memory against the image, historical places upset every effort to freeze meaning in space. Memory is strongly connoted, and connotation opens a temporal gap, stories and above all, the story of the production of the image burst into the image.'⁵

In accordance with this model you could describe Gonzalez-Foerster's park scenario as an 'after-image' of tropical modernity. In the park, a space is opened up between the image of tropical modernity it projects and the references to real park architecture that exists elsewhere. In a way, the park itself becomes the zone between image and referent, the 'gap' as Resina calls it, out of which meaning emanates from diffuse memories. The cinematic dimension of the environment could be called, in Resina's words, a 'hermeneutic amplifier'. Gonzalez-Foerster does not attempt to close the gap between the park as image and the park as referent by supplying factual information. Instead she constructs an atmospheric scenario around this gap to keep it open and amplify the emotional charge of the interpretations that the incongruent link between image and referent might possibly generate.

- Jan Verwoert