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GABRIELA OBERKOFLER: API ÉTOILÉ – A GROWING ARCHIVE

EXHIBITION IN THE PAVILION, SEED ARCHIVE AND MURAL IN THE PLOT 3

Api étoilé – a growing archive

PAVILION PLOT 3

29.4. – 4.9.2022

Entrance free

 

How does landscape change under the conditions of climate change and how can old cultivars be preserved – and also help to meet the challenges of food in the future? Two years ago, Gabriela Oberkofler started an artistic research project on these questions in exchange with gardeners and farmers, the results of which were first shown at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen together with her large-format drawings of complex life forms and will now be shown at the Parzelle in Dresden.

Api étoilé gives the project its name – a small, firm, sweet-sour apple with the name that Friedrich Schiller also called a ’star apple‘ and that has probably been cultivated since Roman times. It is about concrete visualization and the preservation of living cultural knowledge. A seed archive created and designed by Gabriela Oberkofler brings together over 480 old varieties. The planting boxes of a mobile show garden display old vegetables and various mixed cultures in which the plants support each other in growth and in defense against predators, for example a combination of tomato and cinnamon basil. Eight farmers from South Tyrol, Austria and Germany share their experiences and talk about what connects the cultivation of vegetables with a future worth living.

The mural entitled „Mycelium“ was developed by Gabriela Oberkofler as a permanent wall design especially for the location in the Flora I allotment garden association. The gossamer root threads of the mycelium of fungi, such as the mychorriza mushroom, are an important source of inspiration for the wall design, which occupies an area of 16sqm. The fungus, whose mycelium provides other plants with nutrients and defenses, is essential for the evolution and survival of land plants. The intricate web of motifs in the drawings illustrates how in natural environments everything interacts with each other and how the interaction of different living things is the prerequisite for individual organisms to be viable

 

Gabriela Oberkofler (* 1975 in Bolzano) is a visual artist. After studying art at the University of Visual Arts in Corner Brook in Canada and at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart, the focus of her work is artistic research on forward-looking forms of coexistence and the search for new forms of collaborative practice between art and agriculture.

In the fall of 2022 Gabriela Oberkofler will open Taberhof in Flaas in South Tyrol as an institute for alternative agriculture, contemporary art and life in the periphery.

Plot 3 – Branch of the Kunsthaus Dresden
Artistic projects and temporary exhibitions on themes of the coexistence of man and nature. A project and permanent outpost of the Kunsthaus Dresden in cooperation with the allotment garden association Flora I e.V.
The exhibition “Api étoilé – a growing archive” takes place in collaboration with Villa Merkel in Esslingen and was supported by the Municipal District Office Blasewitz.

 

Plot 3
Allotment garden association Flora I e.V.
Bergmannstrasse 39
01309 Dresden-Striesen
(All garden projects under the open sky and the exhibition pavilion can be visited daily)