‘What makes us put
animals in zoos could
also happen to nature’
artists above the city of Basel, visible from
miles around. Born in 1951 in Riehen,
he studied in the 1970s at the Düsseldorf Art
Academy under Joseph Beuys and had his
own gallery in Basel during the 1980s and
1990s, before turning his attention to ‘theme-
oriented art exhibitions and interventions in
the public arena’. He calls himself a ‘freelance
mediator of contemporary art’, but actually
prefers not to be pinned down by definitions:
‘When someone asks me: “Are you an artist?”
I say: “No”, but if you don’t think like
an artist, you couldn’t do these things.’
This installation, his largest to date, was
a long time in the making. It began 30-odd
years ago when a friend showed him a book
by the Austrian artist and architect Max
Peintner containing a series of futuristic
drawings from the 1970s. One of these
images was The Unending Attraction of Nature
(see above), picturing a stadium packed
with spectators looking, spellbound, towards
a fully-grown forest. ‘I was fascinated by
this drawing and went to visit the artist,’
says Littmann. ‘I told him that I found
it an unbelievable image and that it should
be realised – I think he thought I was crazy.’
But the image stuck in Littmann’s mind
and whenever a potential stadium came
up for discussion in Switzerland or nearby,
he pitched the idea. Finally, six years ago,
he came across Wörthersee Stadium, a state-
of-the-art facility with 32,000 seats in the
Austrian town of Klagenfurt. After much
negotiation, the local council agreed to let
him have the use of the stadium for two
months in 2019, free of charge. The €2.2m
funding for the project he generated himself,
almost exclusively through his own contacts
and art patrons in Switzerland, including theFondation Beyeler, but also through the sale
of ‘tree adoptions’ at €5,000 each, which
came with hand-coloured original graphic
prints signed by both Littmann and Peintner.
Littmann enlisted the services of the
highly acclaimed Swiss landscape architect
Enzo Enea to bring Peintner’s vision to life.
The biggest challenge was to find 300 trees
from 19 varieties to make up the typical
central European mini-forest on the pitch.
‘We needed to use what are called “schooled
trees”,’ says Littmann. ‘That means mature
trees that are about 13-14m tall, so about
30-40 years old, that have been repotted
every four to five years, and don’t get stressed
by moving.’ The trees will fill the confines
of the pitch and their bases will be covered
with a fine net, over which Enea’s team will
construct a natural-looking forest floor.
Around the edges will be a meadow area that
goes right up to the stands. The whole thing
will be floodlit at night and the foliage will
change colour as autumn progresses.
Visitors can enter the stadium, at no
admission charge, and move freely around
the stands to see the work from different
perspectives, but the forest is not accessible.
‘What is really important to me in all my
projects in public spaces is perception,’ says
Littmann. ‘I want people to stand and look
at it and ask themselves: “What am I seeing?
What is it about? What does it mean for me?”I want it to provoke their sense of sight and
what they are used to seeing. If that happens,
then for me is the whole thing a success.’
Victor Hugo’s statement ‘Nothing is more
powerful than an idea whose time has come’
could hardly be more appropriate in the case
of For Forest. ‘This project triggers a great deal
of discussion and raises a lot of questions,’
says Littmann. ‘How do we treat nature?
How are forests managed? One criticism,
for example, is: “Austria is full of forests,
why do you need to put one in a stadium?”
To which my answer is: “Yes, that is true,
but what kind of forests are they? They are
monocultures. The native mixed deciduous
forest, which is incredibly important, is
completely marginalised, although we depend
on it, especially now in the context of climate
change. The same problems as in the Amazon
are here right on our doorstep. Immense areas
of forests are dying out and being destroyed
by disease and commercial forestry.
This image brings these issues into focus.”’
Littmann says that, although he never
set out to be deliberately radical with
For Forest, the project has experienced
a considerable amount of opposition,
particularly from the far right (the local
region is a stronghold of the populist
Freedom Party of Austria), with verbal
abuse and calls to ‘get the chainsaws out’.
His original fascination with Peintner’s
image was this ‘futuristic’ idea that ‘what
makes us put animals in zoos could also
happen to nature. But the current focus
on climate change has given the drawing
a new dimension. Perhaps it really had
to take 30 years before it could be realised.’^ ∂
Until 27 October, Wörthersee Stadium, Klagenfurt,
Austria, forforest.net; klauslittmann.com Max Peintner,The Unending Attraction of Nature, pencil drawing, 1970/71, hand-colouredby Klaus Littmann, unique piece from series, courtesy of the artist and For ForestTHE UNENDING ATTRACTION OF
NATURE BY MAX PEINTNER, HAND-
COLOURED BY KLAUS LITTMANN
Architect Max Peintner is a key figure of
the Austrian environmentalist movement,
who represented his country at the Venice
Biennale in 1986 and whose work is in the
collection of MoMA, New York. He created
a pencil drawing in 1970/71, showing
a crowd of onlookers gazing at a forest
in a sports arena. Here, the original artwork
has been hand-coloured by Klaus Littmann,
setting the foliage in sharp contrast with
the heavily industrialised cityscape in the
background. ‘Peintner had the futuristic
idea that what has been happening for
centuries with animals in zoos could also
happen with nature, that we might one
day have to come into special spaces
to observe it,’ says Littmann. The image
continues to resonate half a century on,
appearing in over 20 German textbooks,
as well as publications in France, Denmark,
Estonia, the Czech Republic and Hungary.178 ∑
Art