Roots # 01 - Close Reading Forms of Active Coexistence
During a Nirox residency, as I roamed daily over the landscape, the beauty as well as the refinement and visual order of the environment suddenly aroused in me the desire to capture, step after step, its corporal physicality and the diversity of its flora and fauna. In response to research done by the Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso and to insights he provides into plants and woodlands seen as "superorganisms" that – in networks constituting perfect systems of communal use and active coexistence – cooperate and communicate with each other and are mutually supportive, I began to grapple artistically with entanglements of roots and with the question of the congruency of ecological, artistic, and social "beauty". In the process, mutualism – a form of ecological interaction that aims at ensuring the well-being of all elements concerned – became one of the leitmotivs of my observation and exploration of a physical, spiritual, and social space that is in a constant state of change. The work that I am showing within the framework of Soil and Water consists of drawings on photographs of meshes of entangled roots that I took on site, presented in relief fashion in frames of poplar wood (here, reference is made to the poplar tree and its history as "liberty tree") as well as a collage of texts taken from the thought-space that emerged in the course of my wandering through the landscape and as a result of various encounters.
Barbara Putz-Plecko (AT)
Barbara Putz-Plecko is a visual artist and an academic based in Vienna, Austria. Her artistic projects build on a basis of artistic research encompassing diverse mediums in both the analogue and the digital fields. Her artistic interest centres around a deep interrogation of forms of being, of obvious as well as inconspicuous traces of mutual response, cause and effect and, generally, relationships. The two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and often space-consuming works that she creates present themselves differently to the viewer according to the context in which they have been placed and the manner in which they have been placed there.
Since 1997, Barbara Putz-Plecko has been a professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and, until 2023, was head both of the textiles department and of the multimedia department of Art and Communication Practices. During her tenure, the two departments shared an emphasis on the contextualization of artistic practices as well as on the potentials and effectiveness of artistic strategies in communities and systems. As artist and researcher, she has worked with many academic and non-academic institutions as well as grassroot organizations and has participated in, initiated, and supervised numerous artistic projects in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central America. This work has resulted in a long-term research focus on the potentials of interdisciplinary, trans-disciplinary, and trans-cultural processes of cooperation.
Spending some time in the Nirox Sculpture Park in June of this year allowed her to familiarize herself with this physical, spiritual, and social landscape along with its historical, cultural, and artistic specificities. Research done by the Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso on plants seen as social organisms capable of communication and cooperation led the artist to produce her first artistic sketches for the project Soil and Water.