Johannes Gees’ 2009 installation piece, “Les jardins des mots perdus”, consisted of a portable laser projector which displayed various pieces of text throughout the city of Bordeaux, France during the Evento 2009 festival.
The goal of the piece is to celebrate unplanned and ungroomed urban landscapes. Snippets of text, representative of what one might hear on a city street, guide viewers away from the planned and polished sections of the city into more mundane or run-down areas. Gees argues that these niches that “resist the process of revitalization” are integral to the nature of the city and worth exploring.