Avantgarden
Avantgardening is what artist Evalie Wagner calls the interventions in which she engages with and within nature. In the Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna, she has designed a huge walk-in installation in a greenhouse. A hanging herbarium transforms the space, which is empty in summer, into an impressive art venue that is both an image of nature and a staged cultural landscape.
In our current era – the Anthropocene – the manipulation of flora and fauna has reached a new dimension, and nowhere else other than in the garden does our human relationship to nature become so directly vivid. The unrestrained exploitation and economisation of our planet’s resources and the far-reaching interventions in the Earth’s processes are leading to the destruction of habitats and the progressive loss of intact nature and biological diversity. In this context, botanical gardens have become important preservers and places of scientific documentation of this diversity.
The Botanical Garden of the University Vienna houses around 11,500 plant species from all continents, a collection that has been subject to constant change since its foundation in 1754. Botanical gardens have always been an expression of the endeavour to create an overall view of the plant cosmos of our world through research and cataloguing. With the help of living and dried plant collections, they have become flourishing research and scientific institutions over the centuries. Such an artificially created garden is fascinating not because we think it is untouched, but because a cultural landscape has been created here that flirts with knowledge and aesthetics.
The artist transforms this systematic scientific approach into visual narratives that go beyond botany. She creates a sensual installation with large hanging fabric panels that gather a variety of plant species. Exploring themes of coexistence, botany and the aesthetics of nature representation, the walk-through herbarium creates an open and transformative universe that brings the viewer closer to the subject of ecology and the analogous sensibility of nature from a different perspective.
Avantgarden (2020–2021) | Installation view (Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna)
In the midst of the cultivated nature of the Botanical Garden, a huge plant atlas is thus created that interweaves the visible with the imaginary and illustrates the complexity of trying to grasp nature with the mind alone.
The installation is embedded in a tapestry of sound (see the film below). ‘Noyaux’ is the name of the piece by multi-instrumentalist Benoît Pioulard. Translated from French, it means ‘fruit stones’. Pioulard is primarily concerned with places that have not been created or changed by man. Floating weightlessly, he refers to the numerous areas of origin of plants. The Botanical Garden has always been considered the place where many of the commonly known plants were first planted and propagated. The installation thus also becomes a small archive, a macro-order is presented condensed as a micro-order. As a heterotopia, the garden gathers the whole world in one place, writes the philosopher Michel Foucault. It stands symbolically for the whole, precisely because it is a limited and remote place. The two attitudes, the reasonable, scientific, controlled one and the romantic, wild, natural one, are actually two aspects of a unity. For, as Foucault goes on to note, the garden represents the smallest parcel of the world and at the same time its totality. In this respect, thinking about the garden through the medium of art could change our view of the world.
“Evalie Wagner achieves something special in her works: she makes plants visible. People strolling through a garden perceive many things: they see the sea of blossoms, the stems along an avenue, the green of the crowns. Some may even catch a glimpse of paradise. The plants as individual phenomena are often overlooked – they disappear in the scenery.
In her installation, the plants become actors, they take shape and become tangible phenomena that almost physically impose themselves on us. Detached from their context, the plant forms become recognisable and tangible in their details, details emerge and demand a close look. At this moment, the plants take on a materiality, the textures emerge and compete with the decals in the mind.
At the same time, the plant arrangements are aesthetic compositions that transcend the installation space. The aura of the magical, the paradisiacal that emanates from plants and draws people to the gardens, remains in the installations ... or is intensified. The door to a mythical space remains open.”
Video documentation, Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna (2020)
Sound: Noyaux - Benoît Pioulard, Morr Music | Film: Maximilian Haidacher
Evalie Wagner (1983) is an Austrian artist and designer, who currently lives and works on a farm in Upper Austria and in Vienna.
She studied at the New Design University St. Pölten and the University of Art and Design Linz, where she graduated in Fine Arts and Cultural Studies: Experimental Art and Painting. She has won a number of awards and grants and participated in several exhibitions and residency programmes in Austria and abroad.
Her interdisciplinary work is marked by a wide range of historical and aesthetic connotations, references to design and crafts, and is situated in the space between the poetic and conceptual. Based on extensive research she creates subtly designed, associative works, which can be described as visual metaphors. Her site-specific installations are compelling narratives composed of different elements, be it paintings, botany or objects. With a main focus on floral aesthetics, she calls herself an avant gardener.