Modern Nature: An Homage to Derek Jarman

La Becque is pleased to announce the sixth edition of Modern Nature: An Homage to Derek Jarman, a day-long public event taking place on Saturday, July 19, 2025, from 3pm to midnight in the gardens of the residency on the shores of Lake Geneva.

Initially developed by Elise Lammer in 2019, Modern Nature is a project that pays tribute to the legacy of the English filmmaker, writer, activist, and gardener Derek Jarman (1942–94). The program takes its name from one of Jarman’s most beloved diaries, a text that chronicles the making of Prospect Cottage and its improbable garden in Dungeness, Kent. A haven of resilience and invention, Jarman’s garden bloomed defiantly in the shadow of a nuclear power station, despite the harsh winds and salted soil of its coastal surroundings. More than a metaphor, it became a living artwork—both a sanctuary and a site of political resistance.

La Becque has developed a botanical and artistic tribute to Prospect Cottage in its own wild meadows, cultivating native plants and creating a space where artistic practices and ecological reflection can coexist. Since its inception, Modern Nature has brought together Swiss and international artists for a series of performances, installations, sonic interventions, and screenings—site-specific and time-sensitive works that unfold across the garden and surrounding spaces.

Curated by Vanessa Cimorelli since 2023, Modern Nature continues to evolve as a platform for exploring questions of queerness, ecology, transmission, and transformation. The garden becomes a stage, an archive, a common, and a portal. Each edition invites artists to engage with Jarman’s legacy as a point of departure, drawing new lines of inquiry that extend beyond the historical into the speculative and the sensorial.

This year’s edition is inspired by Jarman’s only known work of short fiction, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping—a surreal, kaleidoscopic road narrative that blurs the line between memory, prophecy, and hallucination. The 2025 program takes this disorientation as a method, inviting artists whose works act as transmissions from liminal zones—ghost frequencies, sonic mirages, flickering signals that resist linear time and singular meaning.

As in Jarman’s story, where roads stretch endlessly and destinations are always just out of reach, the performances this year evoke a landscape in flux: voices loop and distort, silence crackles, rhythms collapse and reassemble. These works speak of wandering, of refusal, of building new routes through the noise of the present. They carry with them stories, memories, wounds, and visions—songs from places not yet charted.

The sixth edition of Modern Nature will feature conversations, installations and performances by Aho Ssan & ASIA, Damsel Elysium, Erell Le Pape & Loréleï Nelle, Nkisi & Tiran Willemse, Time is Away, and Will Ballantyne-Reid. Full program on La Becque’s website and Instagram account.