Alles wird gut — Garten Eden eingerollt
'all will be well — garden eden rolled up' — intervention performance
* performance details, photos © Christian Glaus *
situation
A performance as a botanical guided tour through the castle park on a grey, cold winter day. The Schlosspark is a tree garden originally laid out as an arboretum on a slope, crossed by a small stream whose water falls steeply from a concrete tube onto an artificial rocky landscape, with bridges, steps, gravel paths, a bee house and a covered viewing terrace that offers a wonderful panoramic view of Lake Zurich.
performance process
My plan: to memorise all the plant names that I found written on small boards in the park. I want to give them a voice! Regardless of the actual location of the plant, I will assign each name to a specific place in the park. I want to call up and recall the names one by one. This local memory aid forms the coordinate system of my route. Consistently, I always walk alongside the park paths, while the spectators are asked to always walk along the paths. The choreography of my movement is essentially determined by the terrain.
A rolled-up oriental carpet hangs on a climbing rope from a large tree branch above the path on the lower castle hill. From there, the brightly coloured rope draws a seventy-metre-long, ice-blue line through the air and at ground level through the bushes into the south-western part of the park. At the other end, I stand in oversized fishing boots next to a streamlet in the snow-drenched grass and shrubbery, the rope attached to my climbing harness, I am obscured by snow-covered trees and bushes. As a kind of counterweight to the carpet, I hold this position at an angle for about 20 minutes until all the spectators have arrived and gathered.
Now I announce the botanical tour. With the rope under tension, I move to a tree, circle around it and attach the end of the rope. The fishing boots reach almost to my hips and are very useful: Untied from the rope, I slowly grope next to and in the stream bed into the uneven steep terrain and the slippery ground in the water towards the waterfall. Here and there I pause in daring poses. Then I dart into the snow-heavy shrubbery, sinking into it. Then I plough my way through the masses of snow in the whitish undergrowth and momentarily get stuck under the snow-covered branches of a shrub. I crawl on all fours or move nimbly like a wild animal through the snow-covered foliage, while continuously calling out 'sounding' plant names: «WURZELBLÄTTRIGER SCHNEEBALL ... FRANZÖSISCHER AHORN ... JAPANISCHER AHORN ... KAPPADOZISCHER AHORN ... HORTENSIE ... SCHEINZYPRESSE ... PFAFFENHÜTCHEN ... TROMPETENBAUM ... ALPENJOHANNISBEERE ... DUFTBLÜTE ... ASTILBE ... MAGNOLIE ... ABELIE ...».
The parcours ends on a snow-covered meadow next to the covered viewing terrace: here I throw myself belly-down into the wet snow, turn several rolls around my own axis in the snow-covered grass in a horizontal position, straighten myself swaying into the vertical and recite the last of all memorised plant names.