Fires in Brazil's Amazon; Hurricane Dorian: It takes little more than turning on the news to realize the uncompromising effect climate change is having on our planet. While some people are standing idle (or exacerbating the problem), others are voicing their concern as the growing impatience has multiplied in recent years. Students in Norway, for example, went on strike as a cry for action. Klaus Littmann, however, is taking a different approach. He's attempting to open the public's eyes through his art. The 67-year-old artist has just planted some 300 trees in an Austrian soccer stadium—an incredible feat of physical art meant to challenge our perception of the future of our earth.
In many ways, Littmann had been wanting to do this project for the past 30 years. Ever since he went to a Vienna exhibition and witnessed a 1970 drawing by the Austrian artist Max Peintner, the seed was planted, so to speak. Peinter's work was a forest of trees planted in the middle of a stadium with a crowd of onlookers there for no reason but to look at the vegetation.
Max Peintner original drawing, The Unending Attraction of Nature. This was the work that inspired Littmann to create his current exhibition.
"This drawing fascinated me," says Littmann. "I actually wanted to purchase it. But it was only after I was introduced to Max Peintner did I realize he had sold it to an American collector. That's when I decided I needed to create the drawing in real life, as a work of art." Littmann perceived Peinter's drawing, which is called The Unending Attraction of Nature, as a peek into a future where forests will exist only as an object meant to be seen and studied at an exhibition. "He was so ahead of his time," says Littmann of the Austrian artist. "His work truly has a wide-ranging message."
An aerial view of the nearly 300 trees inside of an Austrian soccer stadium.
Littmann's forest consists of a variety of trees that are native to Austria, as well as Central Europe. The instillation, which opens free to the public on September 9, is called For Forest—The Unending Attraction of Nature. "For me, the installation is a rallying cry for the most pressing issue of our generation," says the Swiss artist. "The exhibition aims to challenge our perception of nature and question its future. It seeks to become a memorial, reminding us that nature may soon only be found in specially designated spaces, as is currently the case with zoo animals."
The trees will eventually be moved to a permanent plot of land near the stadium.
The exhibition is in the 30,000-seat Wörthersee Stadion, home to SK Klagenfurt, a soccer team located in southern Austria, currently playing in the Erste League, the second highest league in the country. The team is playing in a field close to its stadium, as its management has been very supportive of the project. The installation will be in the amphitheater until October 27, before it's carefully moved to a permanent field nearby. That means the public will get to see the fall foliage up close and personal within the bounds of the arena. But Littmann doesn't want it to merely be viewed as a picturesque moment. He wants to leave the public pondering what they just saw: "It's an invitation to reflect—I want them leaving changed, even if that means open to all possibilities of their future, of our future."