Nature laid out in parks is vegetable, a nature that neither flees from nor overtakes us. The park does not counter ordinary nature with another sort, but is rather for many the only ordinarily accessible nature. One which you are still dependent on, yet which you long for as something lost and long gone.

You feel alone in the park, not in the wilderness. Less inhibited than in your own rooms, you sit down in the uncertainly filthy grass. You have stronger reservations about sitting down at the other side of a table where someone else is already seated in a pub than you do sitting next to him on an empty bench. You might lie down naked next to a stranger without even so much as picking at the grass.
Nature is subject to human intervention, without being dependent on it. It will never perish, only change. It cannot provide for you. And just as you remain does everything found clearly belong here, and yet does not allow you to stumble.

Every location which allows you to find peace outside of your own four walls or your paid sleeping quarter can fulfill this promise. Like the dream, which you experience in extreme passivity, the space enraptures and opens itself up to you.
The happening world does not disintegrate for you, but rather doesn’t come together. You forget, you simply are. You are familiar to me. I know how you are feeling. Your attention is drawn to the still-active thinking which continuously recreates your own person and the environment.
Just as the eye focusses one after the other on individual parts which are each lit differently, so does every individual part of a collage have its own exposure, focus and time. The randomness of the given chromatic values, cuts and repetitions characterizes the remoteness of the image within one’s perception, which remains for as long as the self stays trapped in each respective brain.

The space understood as cube opens itself to sight as a slightly elliptical hemisphere. In the collages, the round panorama is filled out to a rectangle. The obvious goes on and on.
This is sand, foliage, water, grass.
The awe of nature owes itself to a heedless attraction which, without consequence, breaks with everything else.

 

In: Birgit Hoffmeister, Made in Berlin, House of Cyprus, Rethymon Centre of Contemporary Art, Athen, G / 1999