Installation as part of the exhibition “Light, Air, Shit” at ngbk, Berlin 2019

Just as the future turns into heaped rubble after it has become the present, the utopian and progressive energies and resources of Eden’s last surviving life reform settlement itself are on the path of dwindling effectiveness and exhaustion.
The outlines of a dead point become visible, a status quo with no horizon of action. All paths leading out of this structure are blocked by the sluggishness of the old, fear and doubt. In Eden the persistence of the old can be seen with great clarity, stuck at a standstill. The worn garden tools are evidence of a previously shared social practice of gardening together, of vegetarian food, self-reformation and future utopias. A collectivity, that has become useless at the latest with the abrupt handling by the trust and the merger with neoliberalism. And now stands in the way of a network of microtraumas and confrontations.

The worn garden tools convey an experience of the decommissioned, useless and fragile, used, abolished and perplexed. And how difficult it is to create something new, something positive – a shared future. It is a group of transformed garden tools that have lost all their functions for what has been. Simply reviving the old is not enough for your use. In order to be effective again, new forms have to be created, rehearsed and rejected, and best of all from missed or failed opportunities, from unrealized opportunities and failures. The experience of precariousness, instability and abyss. Yes, colliding is important for this and it should be able to penetrate something as when ordering the garden.

Installation from various garden tools from the Danielzik family, who lived in the fruit orchard Eden between 1930 and 2016 and did intensive gardening.

Licht, Luft, Scheiße – ngbk