Project: Place in the Woods

A Place in the Woods (APitW) was an on- and offline exhibition and event platform in the Hardtwald, Karlsruhe, and on the Internet. From 6.8. to 30.10.2022, APitW pursued artistic explorations of the forest as a living, experiential, and exhibition space in these two spaces and dealt with the interconnection of digital and analog places as well as institutional parameters and frameworks of "art exhibitions".

A 3 x 5 m billboard structure and a wildlife camera were placed in a clearing along a public bike path. Regional and international young artists were invited to engage with the site and its surroundings. With the poster structure at the center, which itself served as an exhibition space and starting point, new site-specific works were created and existing ones further developed. The camera installed in the clearing uploaded a photo to our website every five minutes, linking on- and offline platforms almost in real time. These images were and are also accessible via a timeline system as an interactive archive of the entire duration of the project, documenting the changing exhibition space, each work on display, animal and human visitors, and also the changing seasons in the surrounding ecosystem. APitW interacted with plants, birds and other forest dwellers in their natural habitat and included them as exhibition visitors. For human recipients - whether visitors or casual strollers - the interaction between culture and nature became an inseparable frame condition of the exhibited artworks. In addition to curated exhibition space, APitW in its unusual positioning was also a narrative: a scenography one stumbles upon, a place that tells a story. While the display and works changed with the seasons and the weather, grew or weathered, the supposed foreign body transformed itself in a similarly organic way as the surrounding forest.

Click here to go to the website

APitW hosted artist residencies over three months, creating artistic interventions and events on site. Guests included Esmée Dros, Walls&Birds, Rafael Lippuner, Dries Segers, Lukas Kesler and Sergio Rojas Chavez. Also shown were artworks, performances, and graphic works by Astrid Seme, Hannah Sakai, Lisa Sifkovits, Olga Hohmann, Zhizhong Kenne, Alexander Theis, Rafael Jörger, Moritz Appich, Maya Strobbe, Laurel Schwulst, Jonathan Mink, Tamara Goehringer, Susanne Kriemann, Wilhelm Knobloch, and the Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations.

APitW was curated and supervised by Jonathan Blaschke, Bruno Jacoby, Johanna Schäfer, Jonas Grünwald, Florian Knöbl, Isabel Motz, and Mona Mayer.
It continues to exist in a changing line-up as a collective and format and builds on experiences from our first impact in new projects.