The exhibition in a Hamburg architecture gallery offered the occasion for an inventory of work. The small gallery space was sounded with a wall-covering personal cartography of projects. The world of TOPOTEK1 was reconfigured in a map and also published as a fold-up plan. The process of mapping one’s identity is also creating a self – a self which is put on the map.

The superficial surfaces are a semiotic approximation in this cartography. Sensing the surface’s complexity and asserting it, the garden – built or still on plan – is a code world, a conveyor of meaning, encompassing all culture of giving meaning.

Landscape is a universal surface. It’s physical structures make spaces- Built, planted, frown, eroded, wind-blown, it’s volumes designate or determine space. They are one means of designing garden-worlds. From the distance all these structures, all landscapes, melt into the texture of a surface. Still, from further away, this texture reconfigures to form, giving shape to the earth’s globe. The surface, this thin film between ground and sky, is where man expresses himself. This is the stratum of his movements, the locate of his experiences, his touch-point with the universe. By design we describe the surface, mark the signs, accentuate their specificity. Real and imaginary coordinate systems fix ideas in space- The surface is like a constantly inquisitive companion, on whose contrariness ideas can be probed. everything is visible on the surface.