Gabriela Oberkofler: Api étoile - ein wachsendes Archiv

»Api étoilé - A Growing Archive« - of the benefits of crops

This archive from Gabriela Oberkofler initiated focuses on agricultural crops. From one continent to another, seeds and field reports are collected with respect to their cultivation. After several months of travel and research, the seeds will be handed over to interested hobby gardeners for the purpose of growing a year's worth of plants. In the following year, they will be displayed as yearlings in the inner courtyard of the Villa Merkel along with drawings, watercolors and videoworks by Gabriela Oberkofler. The plants constitute an opulent, initial kitchen garden of a new type which, as if arising casually, offers a contrast to the park which surrounds the Villa Merkel and, with its anthropo-morphic reshaping of nature, is designed according to the ideal of English landscape gardens. After the plants of this kitchen garden have produced new seeds in turn, these will be added to the growing archive by the gardeners participating in the project. In this way the archive constantly grows and will be continued in an expanded form past the two-year pilot phase. Experience and knowledge are successively added on highly diverse levels.

Exhibition:
Villa Merkel Galerie der Stadt Esslingen, 15/5 - 15/8/2021