Since 1990 the UNHATE Foundation in Treviso, supported by the Benetton Group, annually awards a cultural landscape that was designed and preserved with great sensitivity. Such projects are often unnoticed by the public, yet contribute significantly to a worldwide network of cultural heritage. Their central quality is the harmonious interplay between people and cultivated nature.

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And the winner is…

In this regard, this year’s winner is no exception: the jury recently awarded the 30th Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens to the tea plantations in Dazhangshan, located along the slopes of Dazhang Mountain in southeastern China. For centuries the cultivation of tea on terraced hillsides has been a characteristic feature of this region: hedges meticulously shaped into waves, surrounded by mountain forests and paddy fields in the valleys – a landscape that seems out of time, particularly when considering the increasingly industrialized production of crops around the world.

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This landscape image results from the work of a group of farmers who formed a cooperative in 2001. The aim was to preserve this unique cultural landscape, first mentioned in Lu Yu’s (703-804) “The Classic of Tea”, and to continue developing it in a contemporary way. The cooperative currently comprises about a dozen family-owned farms that cultivate nearly 10,000 hectares of land – including tea plantations covering more than 500 hectares – by adhering to the principles of organic agriculture. The Dazhangshan Organic Tea Farmer Association recently also received the certification of the Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International, FLO. The certification strengthens the cooperative’s marketing activities, and the Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens inspires people to rethink the way they act as consumers. While the prize alone is insufficient to preserve cultural landscapes, it nevertheless helps make the public aware of such exemplary landscape treasures.

Every year the Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche awards the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens – to attract attention to a site which is particularly rich in natural, historical and creative values. This year the jury has decided to dedicate the twenty-fifth annual award to Osmače and Brežani, two villages in Podrinje, a region of eastern Bosnia, near the border with Serbia.

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Osmače and Brežani together comprise one of the many places in Bosnia where, two decades ago, the life was torn from a community, its long-established tradition of living together in a multi-cultural environment was destroyed and those who survived were dispersed. In 1991, before the war, Osmače had 942 inhabitants and Brežani 273. What makes these villages a witness to a supremely significant experience is the presence of a small group of young families, farmers and stockbreeders, who began to return in 2002 and have been trying to find the road back to the texture of life. They began to construct new relationships between people, rebuild the houses and took care of the land.

Today, the place is an archipelago of hamlets, settlement cells a few hundred metres from each other scattered over an area of around 20 square kilometres at an altitude of be-tween 900 and 1,000 metres, a patchwork of meadows and woods scored by streams and rivers.

The International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens aims to achieve a more intimate understanding, and ensure a wider awareness of the profound reasons that bind individuals, families or small community groupings to a place. These villages raise the urgent question of how best to construct a multi-cultural space, proceeding not from the distribution of places to the different elements but from a vision in which different people together inhabit a place. The jury has decided to entrust the Carlo Scarpa to two of the leading figures in this process, representatives and witnesses of their communities, their cultures and their villages: Muhamed Avdić and Velibor Rankić.

Images: Zijah Gafić for Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche