After Eden: Art With and Against the Garden

About

This course approaches the garden as both a living system and a political site. It combines artistic fieldwork in Salzburg’s historic gardens with studio practice to explore the promises of the garden and to examine the forms of power that shape it. Working with the garden means attuning to its rhythms and material realities. Working against the garden means questioning it as an apparatus of design, control, and exclusion.
Through guided visits and fieldwork, participants observe, map, listen, collect traces, and read histories. This shared research becomes material for studio work and links local sites to wider questions of colonial botany, classification, tourism, labour, and the biodiversity crisis.
Daily sessions in the studio combine brief input from the instructor with hands-on making and group critiques. Participants develop individual projects across media, supported by a process field-book. A small garden space inside Fortress Hohensalzburg serves as an occasional extension of the studio. Here, we build a shared base for testing methods, staging reversible interventions, and for simply spending time together

Course leader

Christian Kosmas Mayer

Target group

Requirements:
Willingness to discuss and work in groups, and to engage in independent creative exploration and experimentation.
What to bring:
Participants should bring materials they prefer to work with, such as paints, clay, fabrics, photo camera, notebook or digital tools

Fee info