- Celebrating 75 years of Geoffrey Bawa’s iconic country garden
Lunuganga, for those of us who know about it, is an idyllic escape – the Bentota estate and country house of the legendary modern architect Geoffrey Bawa. That estate and its renowned garden celebrate 75 years this year and the Geoffrey Bawa Trust will be marking this momentous anniversary with ‘To Lunuganga’ – over a year of mindful activities that celebrate the Lunuganga garden and Geoffrey Bawa’s singular vision.
When Bawa set up the Geoffrey Bawa Trust 40 years ago in 1982, he made the remarkable decision of issuing a mandate that was to foster ecological and environmental sciences, art, and architecture – a visionary choice of intertwined disciplines. The programme ‘To Lunuganga,’ which celebrates the Lunuganga garden, holds this commitment to these very different yet very connected disciplines at its core.
To Lunuganga
‘To Lunuganga’ explores the inseparability of art and ecology, particularly in the ways we understand nature and the natural, archives and rituals, food and healing. Dedicated to the garden and using the garden as a lens for engagement, the trust’s curatorial team explores multivocal projects across generations and geographies in this programme.
‘To Lunuganga’ is organised across three seasons, considering the overarching and increasingly unpredictable temporalities at Lunuganga and its relationship to the Earth’s crust, to the biosphere, and the cosmos.
Season 1: May-August 2023
Yala/Sirupokam/Southwest monsoon 2023
Programme announced in April 2023
Season 2: September 2023-April 2024
Maha/Perumpokam/Northeast monsoon 2023-’24
Programme announced July 2023
Season 3: May-August 2024
Yala/Sirupokam/Southwest monsoon 2024
Programme announced in April 2024
Four essential themes will underlie the programme: nature and the natural, empathy through ecology, access beyond language, and garden as lens.
A range of events merging cultural and ecological activities will be presented in each season. Collaborating with a range of individuals and institutions from Sri Lanka and overseas, participants of the programme in Season 1 will include: Clara Kraft Isono (the UK), Firi Rahman (Sri Lanka), Hélène Binet (the UK), Instituto Burle Marx (Brazil), Dakin Hart (the US), Reena Khallat (India), Sumayya Vally, (South Africa and the UK), University of Sri Jayewardenepura (Sri Lanka), University of Peradeniya (Sri Lanka), Young Astronomers’ Club (Sri Lanka).
The curatorial team will collaborate with a Youth Advisory Board and three accessibility advisors on the ‘To Lunuganga’ programme to explore how cultural and environmental endeavours can reach wider audiences with a deeper impact.
Speaking at the launch of ‘To Lunuganga,’ Geoffrey Bawa Trust Chairperson Channa Daswatte shared that Lunuganga, as we know it today, began its journey at around the same time Sri Lanka began its journey as an independent country – Bawa acquired the property which was then an abandoned rubber plantation in January 1948 and set about creating a tropical version of a European renaissance garden.
That said, Daswatte shared that Lunuganga was a garden where Bawa engaged with and engineered the environment in an effort to lift the spirits of those who walked through it. “Our country is also like that,” he noted. “There is very little of our country that is natural. Much of it is man-made. The paddy fields, for instance, are man-made but are made in such a way that nature has taken over and captured the landscape as its own. Lunuganga is a microcosm of that. The whole of it is man-made, but nature has taken over to create something truly special.”
Intertwining disciplines
Building on Bawa’s vision of fostering ecological and environmental sciences, art, and architecture, ‘To Lunuganga’ also sees two very important biodiversity-related research projects taking place in collaboration with the University of Sri Jayewardenepura and the University of Peradeniya.
The University of Sri Jayewardenepura’s Department of Zoology will see a team of researchers studying the hog deer, a species of deer that is most frequently found in the area surrounding Lunuganga.
University of Sri Jayewardenepura Department of Forestry and Environmental Science Centre For Sustainability Research Officer Vimukthi Fernando explained that hog deer had been listed as critically endangered by the IUCN and was one of the rarest species of deer in Sri Lanka. However, very little research has been conducted on the hog deer. Even their origins are disputed, with some researchers supporting the theory that they were introduced to Sri Lanka as a game species for hunting by the British and others theorising that hog deer have existed in Sri Lanka since prehistoric times.
The University of Sri Jayewardenepura will be conducting studies that map out the home ranges of hog deer, their population size, sex ratios, age and social structures, foraging behaviour, and mating behaviour to paint a comprehensive picture of this elusive species and set the foundation for developing effective conservation strategies of the species.
The study will also compare Sri Lankan hog deer with hog deer populations in North India to investigate genetic links between the two in an effort to evaluate the possibility of Sri Lankan hog deer being a species introduced to Sri Lanka by the British.
University of Peradeniya Department of Botany Professor Gehan Jayasuriya will be conducting a long-term study into the flora of Lunuganga, exploring the estate as an estuarine island ecosystem (Lunuganga is an estuary of the Lunuganga River). The aim of this study is to aid conservation by creating a baseline of data that can be used to build effective conservation strategies.
No previous studies have focused on an island in an estuary, and the isolated nature of Lunuganga, paired with Geoffrey Bawa’s nature-led vision makes Lunuganga a powerful location from which to base a study that looks at the regeneration of disturbed vegetation and the other ecosystem dynamics of an estuarine island.
The study has already commenced and the research team has already identified 43 angiosperm species belonging to 333 plant families, six of which are endemic. The team from the University of Peradeniya also hopes that this study will set the stage for greater interest in biodiversity training and for further Public-Private Partnerships (PPP).
A happy step to mark 75 years of Lunuganga
Geoffrey Bawa Trust Chief Curator Shayari de Silva also spoke at the ‘To Lunuganga’ launch, highlighting that this anniversary had given the Geoffrey Bawa Trust the opportunity to engage with audiences from both the environmental side and cultural side and celebrate Bawa’s visionary ideas in both spaces.
“A garden was not just a place. It was a medium to explore ecology and culture,” de Silva said of Bawa’s mindset, adding that ‘To Lunuganga’ gave the trust’s curatorial team the room to unite architecture and the sciences for greater overall understanding and engagement across its wide audience.
Season 1 of ‘To Lunuganga’
This year, the Geoffrey Bawa Memorial Lecture, now in its 20th cycle, will take the form of a discussion on the gardens of three important multidisciplinary makers across three continents: Isamu Noguchi, Roberto Burle Marx, and Geoffrey Bawa.
A star party and poetry reading will allow audiences to experience Lunuganga aurally at night, while a Tree Talks podcast will chart access to the garden through its specific flora, tapping into the intertwining of humans, plants, and local deities.
A 3D archive project with Clara Kraft Isono and the Royal College of Art in London will explore the garden as a living collection, mapping the past and future at Lunuganga. As the organisers of Open House Colombo (part of the Open House Worldwide network) this year, the trust will highlight and bring access to gardens and greenspaces across Colombo and Bentota.
A publication exploring space through smell and feel will portray the sensorial experience of the garden.
Three celebrated artists will make site-specific works at Lunuganga; Sumayya Vally, Reena Kallat, and Firi Rahman.