Gabriela OberkoflerApi étoilé – Ein wachsendes Archiv

The bean is the star! … Gabriela Oberkofler devotes herself to useful plants, collecting seeds as well as accounts of experience concerning their cultivation, and archiving them. Following a journey of several months from Hamburg to Bergamo, in the course of which she met, interviewed and filmed many experts, the book “Api étoilé – Ein wachsendes Archiv” (a growing archive) now presents an elegant and unsettling piece of documentation. Her Mobile Seed Archive of useful plants, for instance, conceived as a growing and participatory project, assembles genuine rarities in circular, labelled Petri dishes set into MDF panels. Alongside seeds of the spinach variety Guter Heinrich, Gabriela Oberkofler presents, for example, seeds of the butterhead lettuce Maisbutter, of celtuce, of green orache, of the beefsteak tomato Riese von Omsk and of anise hyssop. Alongside the extensively assembled yet apparently rather unspectacular tomato seeds, the largest section of the archive is reserved for beans. What jewels, one is tempted to say, what pearls are gathered here. Two-coloured beans, beans tending towards violet, brown beside white beside black, round or rather elongated, beans with two- or three-coloured patterns on their skins. The latter are mostly counted among the runner beans, which in German also go by the name Käferbohnen or – who could blame them? – Prunkbohnen, beans of splendour. What entrances they make! One can state without a doubt: the bean is the star. And then the artist draws, in inimitable fashion, an inner programme of what has been collected and stored. For some time now she has used fine pens for her drawings. They offer lightfast inks and were employed for the series “Pflanzenpalaver” (plant palaver). The pens make it possible to place strokes extremely close to one another, densely packed. This allows extremely fine textures to be woven. They invite viewers to look closely, to immerse themselves in the graphic abbreviations. It is almost as if one were losing oneself in them, dissolving into the dynamic hatchings and richly detailed layers of strokes they offer. And since nothing – neither objects nor plants, insects or the rhizomes of fungi – is defined by contours, but rather exclusively by variously shaped configurations of surface, the drawings appear painterly at the same time. In “Api étoilé,” then, it is not a matter of prescribing solutions and paths into a better future. Rather, it is about the growing readiness – against the background of the realisation that things cannot go on as they have – to sharpen the senses and to accept detours, to endure perplexity, to risk the experiment and to sound out what is new. There is no arguing it away: of what originally constituted biological diversity on earth, barely more than a quarter survives. That is sobering. Yet it is precisely in such an open attitude towards the necessary and the unforeseeable that gardening and the productive practice of art prove surprisingly similar. With their respective linguistic or strategic means, both must respond to socially relevant questions. Here as there, in gardening as in art, one has to be willing to try things out, to observe, to question, to be astonished, to attempt new paths – and in the best case one stands at the end before a solution, or a process just beginning, or an idea of which one could not have had even the faintest inkling the day before. Or, as Mathias von Mirbach, co-founder of community-supported agriculture in Germany, puts it quite simply: “And the funny thing is: it all works.” (Andreas Baur in his contributing text)

Exhibition:
Villa Merkel Galerie der Stadt Esslingen, 15/5 – 15/8/2021