20. September 2023
18 Shades of Gay was a kilometer-long installation suspended over Saint-Catherine Street in Montreal each summer from 2017 to 2019. (Photo: Jean-Michael Seminaro, courtesy of v2com)
Canadian landscape architect Claude Cormier died on September 15, 2023, at the age of 63. One month earlier, Cormier spoke with The Cultural Landscape Foundation for a forthcoming oral history project. Upon his passing, TCLF released a clip from the project in which Cormier revisits a manifesto he wrote in 2008.
The title of this post, “Artificial, but Not Fake,” is one of the short statements that comprise Cormier's manifesto from 2008. He follows those words in the short film embedded below with “authenticity above all else,” but then goes on to explain how Lipstick Forest “celebrates” the artificial in a way that is authentic, that clearly says “these are not real trees.” With paradoxical commentary and playful designs, no wonder the name of the 2021 monograph on the landscapes of Claude Cormier is Serious Fun.
Lipstick Forest, Montreal (Photo: Jean-Francois Vezina, courtesy of v2com)
Watch Claude Cormer revisit the manifesto he wrote in 2008, a text inspired by fellow Canadian Bruce Mau's “Incomplete Manifesto for Growth,” which was written a few years before as “a way of thinking about creative life.”:
