Download here the Visitor's guide. - Les Ateliers de Rennes

78
Les Prairies's artists
Gare SNCF, parvis sud
LOIS WEINBERGER,
Garden, 1994-2012.
Production
Les Ateliers de Rennes 2012.
Since the beginning of the 1970s Lois Weinberger has been
militant in the cause of spontaneous vegetation. He is an
opponent of voluntaristic cultivated plots and weeding,
and the ideas of purity and purification that go with them.
Weinberger is the advocate of weeds, the fringe and the
interstices. His preoccupations, in fact, are more political
than botanical. Through the dynamics of indigenous and
non-indigenous species he raises the question of conflict
between native populations and immigrants and the
contingent problems of identity and migration. Processes of
hybridization, colonization and interference occur and lead
to a progressive blurring of the distinction between «wild»
and «cultivated». In Weinberger’s work it is always the hardy,
invasive, self-propagating plant that prevails.
Garden occupies an interstice of the city of Rennes. The
southern forecourt of the station, which is bordered by
railway lines, a prison and waste ground, presents a usefully
imprecise area on which to place two thousand yellow plastic
buckets full of earth and spontaneous vegetation. «I don’t
plant anything and I don’t sow anything. I leave the soil
open to whatever comes, wherever it comes from – the wind,
animals, even the earth itself», says Weinberger a great
believer in «letting things happen».
Revived for Prairies, 3rd edition of Les Ateliers de Rennes
2012 – biennial for contemporary art (September 15th-
December 9th 2012), this ephemeral and changing work of art
will remain settled until the end of the biennial. It has been
realized with the cooperation of Ville de Rennes.
Lois Weinberger
Born in 1947 in Stams, lives and works in Vienna (Austria).
Garden, 2002. installation view, Lower Austria
Museum, St Pölten.
Courtesy of the artist.
“Plastic buckets are arranged on a concrete surface, filled
with soil from open land. Since there are seeds in the soil /
the work will develop on its own. Spontaneous vegetation.
With time, all that remains of the pots will be fragments of
/ colorless plastic on the overgrown areas. These, too, will
ultimately dissolve, and the blossoms alone will recall their
initial color. Later, my work will hardly be noticed / the
creator has disappeared.“
L.W., Vienna, 1994.