Gabriela Oberkofler: Api étoilé – Ein wachsendes Archiv

The bean is the star

"Gabriela Oberkofler is dedicated to useful plants and collects and archives seeds and reports on her experiences with their cultivation. After several months of travelling from Hamburg to Bergamo, during which she met, interviewed and filmed many experts, her book "Api étoilé - Ein wachsendes Archiv" (Api étoilé - A growing archive) is an elegant and stirring documentation. Her mobile seed archive on useful plants, for example, designed as a growing and participatory project, collects genuine rarities in circular, labelled Petri dishes embedded in MDF panels. In addition to seeds of the spinach variety Guter Heinrich, Gabriela Oberkofler presents, for example, seeds of the lettuce Maisbutter, asparagus lettuce, green garden melilot or the beef tomato Riese von Omsk and aniseed mint. In addition to the extensive collection of apparently less spectacular tomato seeds, the largest section of the archive is reserved for beans. What gems, one might say, what pearls are gathered here. Two-coloured bean seeds, beans that play with purple, brown next to white next to black, round or rather elongated, beans with two or three-coloured patterns on the outer skin. The latter are usually categorised as fire beans, which are also known as beetle beans or - who could blame them? - showy beans. What an appearance they make! There is no doubt about it: The bean is the star.
And then the artist draws an inner programme of what she has collected and stored in an inimitable way. For some time now, she has been using fine pencils to draw. They offer lightfast inks and were used in the "Pflanzenpalaver" series. The pens make it possible to place lines extremely close together, close to each other. This makes it possible to weave extremely fine textures. These invite the viewer to take a closer look, to immerse themselves in the graphic abbreviations. It is almost as if you lose yourself in them, as if you are absorbed in the dynamic hatching and detailed lines. And since nothing - neither objects nor plants, insects or mushroom rhizomes - is defined by contours, but rather exclusively by differently shaped surfaces, the drawings also appear painterly.
Api étoilé" is therefore not about prescribing solutions and paths to a better future. Rather, it is about realising that things cannot go on as they have done up to now, and being prepared to sharpen our senses and accept detours, endure helplessness, dare to experiment and explore new things.
There is no denying that barely a quarter of what originally constituted biodiversity on earth has survived. That is sobering.
However, it is precisely in such an open-minded attitude towards the necessary and unforeseeable that gardening and the productive practice of art are surprisingly similar. The aim is to respond to socially relevant issues using the respective linguistic or strategic possibilities. Here and there, in gardening as in art, you have to be prepared to try things out, to observe, to scrutinise, to wonder, to try new approaches - and in the best case, you end up with a solution or an incipient process or an idea that you could not even have had a hint of a premonition of the day before.
Or as Mathias von Mirbach, the co-founder of community-supported agriculture in Germany, puts it quite simply: "And the funny thing is: it all works." (Andreas Baur in his contribution to the book.)

Exhibition:
Villa Merkel Gallery of the City of Esslingen, 15/5 - 15/8/2021