Heat Trap

What is nature? What is artificial? Philosopher Dieter Birnbacher distinguishes between two ways to differentiate the dichotomy of natural and artificial. In the genetic sense, the two terms say something about the origin of a thing. The natural state would have existed even without humans, the artificial state goes back to human influences. In the qualitative sense, on the other hand, an object is judged in terms of its current condition and form of appearance. According to Birnbacher, the English Garden in Munich, where this exhibition takes place, would be understood as something natural in the qualitative sense. The park was created by human hand, but at the same time it is indistinguishable in its appearance from things that were created without human intervention. It is a perfect illusion that was precisely planned down to the smallest detail at the end of the 18th century and, due to its multi-layered ambivalence, becomes the starting point of the group exhibition in terms of content and location. The Orangery, designed by Sir Benjamin Thompson in 1789, is located in the middle of the park, which is based on nature. As an architectural category of horticulture, the Orangery was considered a perfect symbiosis of garden and building at the time of its creation. There, precious oranges and other citrus fruits grew protected from the winter temperatures even north of the Mediterranean. The result was a place of gardening and engineering, away from meteorological rules, with a controlled climate - a shelter. In the artificial-natural environment of the Orangerie, „Heat Trap“ deals with nature in urban space, the search for untouched ecosystems, natural imperfection, imaginative interpretations of flora and fauna, aesthetics of nature, man-made voids and the urge for perfection. The works question the qualitative naturalness of the environment by acting visibly artificial themselves, revealing the illusion of nature in urban space. In the age of the anthropocene, humanity longs for something that has already changed itself to such an extent that they would not recognize it if they actually found it. The boundaries of the dialectical contradiction between art and nature are blurring.