impossible garden

‘Impossible Garden’ was a week-long immersive photo, audio, and olfactory installation that invited viewers to step into a sensory exploration of memory and place. Over many visits over many years, I took photographs in my teta’s garden in the hills of Baabdat, Lebanon, which I then printed on wallpaper and mulberry silk habotai, wrapping the space in images that reflected the intimacy and layers of time spent there. The installation’s design allowed viewers to experience these images from both sides and in movement, creating a sense of being surrounded by memory itself. 

The soundscape, created in collaboration with musician Emilio Quezeda Ibanez, incorporated recordings from the garden, blending the natural sounds of Lebanon with the personal (my teta’s voice, a car driving by), creating an auditory landscape that also interacted with the sounds of the city (the installation was on a noisy street in NYC), fusing the current moment with a past memory. A custom incense was also created using essential oils derived from plants in the garden (rose, jasmine, gardenia, fig, cedar), which burned on the first night of the installation.
Impossible Garden explored the idea of memory as a living, shifting entity, intertwined with the places we inhabit. The garden, a symbol of both continuity and change, became a site of personal and collective reflection, connecting past and present in a shared experience of place. The project highlighted how memory and landscape inform one another, creating a dialogue between the physical and emotional remnants of home, identity, and belonging.





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LAUREN DACCACHE

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ABOUT
Lebanese-American (b. 1993) 
pictures, pictures of pictures, and spaces and objects made out of pictures.