short description:
No garden, no oasis, no idyllic and lavishly green scenery, but a potentially sensual and strange retreat for humans and plants. In This is not a garden, a human-vegetal utopian vision and dystopian reality seem to overlap. A ground floor space in a dusky atmosphere invites us to engage with and embrace that which is vegetal. A place to live life at a slower pace, a place where humans are guests and plants are in charge: sprouting, dry and dead things next to moldy, wet, and living things. The performers lay a trail to new transcorporeal arrangements. Legs connected to flowers, bottoms, leaves, heads, stems, hands, and branches. What can happen if we allow ourselves to be intimate with plants? An encounter of a different kind.
By means of her [Lisa Hinterreithner] immersive/participatory as well as installation-based setting, she [Lisa Hinterreithner] gently highlights the social dimension in the shape of individual/collective participation and the sensitisation of perception processes, i.e., the sensually charged moment of smelling, of tasting, and especially of transcorporal touching/feeling with vegetable forms, which the performers bring into play, as aesthetic experience.
The performance, which is bathed in dimmed, relaxed light and noticeably plays with the experience of time, hints at another moment, too, which receives increasing focus in the contemporary performative arts due to the growing societal pressure of reality/time: varieties of slowing down, which not only re-sharpen our perception, but perhaps may also offer utopian (playfully advanced) potential. Julian Pörksen observes “that the suspension of compulsory time-utilisation may lead to an aesthetic condition of informal, playful contemplation, to a mode of being in which nothing is wanted, nothing expected”7.
An artistic biotope in the sense of a resident native vegetable world that is neither domesticated nor colonialised nor exhibited as setting nor (over-)aestheticised, which the title of the work already hints at. Analogous to this, the natural materials coming into play and later mostly returned to their natural surroundings, such as straw, branches, moss, herbs, clay and plants, are not to be conceived as props, but as non-human (animate) beings and equal subjects who with their reality / their independent existence enter into a dialogue, or better, a metabolic exchange with us terrestrians.
Artistic direction, creation, performance: Lisa Hinterreithner
Creation, performance: Rotraud Kern, Sara Lanner, Linda Samaraweerová
Set design: Lisa Hinterreithner, Sara Lanner
Sound, composition: Lisa Kortschak, Elise Mory
Costume: Daniela Grabosch
Research: Markus Gradwohl, Lisa Hinterreithner
Clay objects: Jacob Bartmann, Lisa Hinterreithner
Set plan: Kathrin Kemp
Set construction: Pia Proskawetz
Set assistant: Michaela Altweger
Press: Simon Hajos
Photo and video documentation: Eva Würdinger, Markus Gradwohl
Production management: Franziska Zaida Schrammel
A production by Up. (Unpredictable Past) and Art Lovers
Co-production Tanzquartier Wien, SZENE Salzburg, Galerie FÜNFZIGZWANZIG, Cooperation Creative Cluster
Funded by the Municipal Department of Cultural Affairs, Vienna, Stadt Salzburg, Land Salzburg and the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport.
Thanks to blumenkraft, Paul Horn, Agnes Schneidewind, Daniel Stuhlpfarrer, Maria Eugenia Tarquini-Lanner and Helmut Zwander
... functions as a hierarchy-free rehearsal stage or scenic test arrangement without central perspective, which one experiences on the one hand as a “retreat for humans and plants”, and on the other hand as a processionally unfolding quiet/sustainable heterotopic space of discourse.
“If a thousand forms of acting inspire the earth, then why did one want to imagine it as essentially lifeless and inanimate? […] Can we gain the ability to keep to the earth’s own animacy?” (Bruno Latour)1
... the audience may choose to put on headphones at tables and follow a podcast previously recorded ..., which among other things asks whether, or how, plants perceive humans (as a threat).
In the second part of the podcast, the threat is substantiated by way of the colonisation of plants, which among other things is shown by the fact that plants which are torn out of their natural habitat and transferred to alien natural and cultural environments, may lose their old functions and meanings, and also that their original appellations are renamed with Latin terms.
The table arrangements again form individual, island-like worlds with an intimate life of their own, which over the course of the performance grow together, the room, which gets more and more filled and played with plants, becoming a landscape which can also be perceived as a developing/temporary (utopian) artistic biotope – not as an artificial biotope.
“The aesthetic methods of the artists thus enable new, differentiated, sensual approaches to phenomena which up to now were not, or could not be determined conceptually, and with this propagate new forms of representation. Through them, the planet-wide processes entangled in local developments, and thus scaling processes of the Anthropocene, which normally are controlled via data and algorithms, can be experienced and grasped. Finally, they articulate many seemingly abstract processes whose effects are destructive by reconnecting them to concrete individual and social experiences.”5
On the other hand, the importance of humanity’s part in our terrestrial cosmos dwindles considerably by a focus on non-human life, in that animals and plants now gradually receive the attention due to them and thus – another significant side effect –the/our nature-culture relationship has to be conceived (fully) anew. To put it pointedly with Bruno Latour’s words: “The anthropos of the Anthropocene is nothing more than the dangerous fiction of a universal player acting as unified mankind.”3
A performance-Installation by Lisa Hinterreithner
Textbites from Stefan Tigges on This is not a garden by Lisa Hinterreithner
Michel Serres, who by stressing that we “receive gifts (dons) from the world, inflict damage (dommage) on it, which the earth then returns in the shape of new given factors (données)” also (in-)directly touches current discourses of care and mindfulness, first of all asks: “Does one still have to prove that our intellect violates the world? Does it no longer feel the vital need for beauty? Beauty requires peace; peace presumes a new contract.”2
In the course of the performance, which is underpinned by an (atmospheric) sound collage (Lisa Kortschak, Elise Mory) structuring the room, the audience is invited, e.g., to make sculptures from branches on the tables, touch moss, leave a handprint in moist clay reminding one of a biological footprint, feel plants, smell herbs, lay down unter blankets of foliage or tree-branch tents, or to choose their own rather contemplative/meditative positions (often reclining) in the natural landscape near the end of the performance.
Earth is, as Jürgen Renn and Bernd Scherer also state, neither “mere resource” nor “stable environment”, nor a “backdrop to our actions” by which, thus the decisive cesura, the history of mankind through bleaching of the Holocene transforms into a highly dynamic history of the earth.3
