The interpreter who accompanied me to the garden is over six foot tall, he could see above the wall, so I thin that the dimensions are roughly Vitruvian, fitting the proportions of Litnianski’s body.
Like the windows of the Edwardian school where I live, designed to be above the child’s height, so that students would not be distracted by the view outside. The main dioramas of small objects are at eye level. In the Poetics of Space, Bachelard describes the interior as an intimate space and the outside a void. Litnianski’s garden in this sense is an interior space and looking at it even when he was alive gave me, at least, the impression of entering something private and forbidden. Litninianski (or in my case his son) used to invite the visitor to follow him into the space, where you would remain enclosed until he let you out.
On first sight of the house, it has the appearance of a modern hermitage. The hermitage was designed to look as though built by the hermit himself, with his surrounding objects. Looking more carefully, one can see the house is tiny and hidden within these rocky columns. It is more lie Saint-Pol Roux’s home, a fisherman’s cottage encased in a manor house. Litnianski began collecting things that had become useless, dirty, broken, empty, unfashionable or perhaps embarrassing.
