Tuesday@Secession: Andrea Lumplecker with Isa Klee, Salma Shaka & Johannes Wiener
August 9, 2022, 7pm–11pm
The small meadow next to the Secession, part of the public green space, is declared a biodiversity area in agreement with the magistrates. WE ARE OF THE EARTH, IN OUR DIVERSITY.* We share the planet with other species. That our past and present ways of life are turning against our diversity in nature and culture to an extreme degree is something we are feeling more than ever right now. The following interventions invite us to activate new ways of dealing with this green site.
Andrea starts her DJ set with DEEP LISTENING by Pauline Oliveros. Deep Listening means paying attention to the small things and the details – listening to insects, mosses, to species beyond the human. Just as the piece refers to listening to each other while the musicians improvise, the actors of the evening try to work and play together in harmony with the spirit and the (acoustic) space of the green.
In conversations with interested people, Isa immerses herself in the Secession’s green – between withered and irrigated plants, grasshoppers, honeybees and hoverflies – into a world full of life forms and cross-species relationship potentials. Naming, including in the form of a species inventory that underlies these conversations, is essential for establishing relationships. Site-specific species’ names ephemerally find their way into an installation.
Salma prepares and serves Yarrow tea to visitors, as its wide cultural and medicinal applications are introduced to them. Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) is a plant that has been detected growing in the small meadow of the Secession. Tea and conversations aim to encourage visitors to look closer at their feet and the green spaces they walk on in the city, to question man-made, structured aesthetics of the landscape, and to return to the focal points of indigeneity and colonialism in the preservation and loss of biodiversity worldwide.
Johannes plants viper’s bugloss and mourning nightshade in the particularly dry areas of the meadow. Deliberate interventions in “nature” are juxtaposed with leaving it to grow wild. A sculptural work with dead insects refers to our relationship to the ecosystems on which we humans, like insects, depend and where we all play a central role.
* Vandana Shiva, Growing gardens of diversity
