I had an absolute blast at the Summer Academy for Fine Arts in Salzburg! I got a tranzit scholarship (awarded by ERSTE Stiftung) to attend an intensive and carefully-curated 2-weeks installation course, After Eden: Art With and Against the Garden, led by artist Christian Kosmas Mayer and his assistant, artist Andrew Read ne Pharaoh, which happened at an amazing location in Salzburg: Festung Hohensalzburg.
Our class of 16 international artists was immersed in the history of the place, participating in private garden tours and art lectures, exhibition openings and connected events. We also made sure to create an inclusive space for discussions and to support each other. We created some meaningful artworks guided by the amazing team at Summer Academy during the period of 20 July – 31 July.
I don’t have an art degree, so this was a great experience for me in terms of formal art education. Most people are impressed that I manage to exist in the art world without a degree. So when I got this scholarship, I had no major expectations from what would turn out to be a period of intense emotions and passionate creativity. I felt right at home among my peers, my human kin as Donna Haraway would call them.
The first week was dedicated to research. I found my subject on the first day of arriving in Salzburg, the Metasequoia glyptostroboides tree, which is planted in many gardens there. Metasequoia glyptostroboides (in Chinese, shui-sa, "water tree”) is an endangered species and it was only discovered in the wild in 1941, in a valley at the intersection of the Chinese provinces of Hubei and Sichuan (presently, Chongqing Shi province). As a consequence, all trees in Europe come from these seeds brought from China in the 1940s, suffering from inbreeding depression, having a very narrow gene pool to draw from and replicate. I became immersed in the story of this tree that has been among us for millions of years but which scientists uncovered only recently. In our present climate crisis, we need to protect such endangered species because if diversity goes, we all go.
Christian Kosmas Mayer asked the Summer Academy to let us use a garden in the fortress, a closed garden (hortus conclusus) used by monks to plant medicinal herbs in the Middle Ages. Whenever we spent time there, it was a very healing and joyful experience, we made art there, we read from books, we shared some personal creative writings and we were delighted by the sounds of the performance echoing from the classes of the Academy. Here is a clip from the first day, Christian Kosmas Mayer reading to us a fragment from My Garden (Book) by Jamaica Kinkaid, while Taiwo Jacob Ojudun & Uche Emmanuel Enechukwu & Damilola Orukotan were performing for their students.
In the mornings we would have lectures and we would work in the afternoon. We visited Palace Hellbrunn and Christian asked us to write a piece of creative writing as if it were written in the voice of a plant found in the Garden. I knew I was going to find a Metasequoia tree there… and there it was. We later shared our writings when we went back to our private garden at the fortress.
We were advised to bring some materials from home and to also take whatever we could find in the storage room of the Academy. I found a band of mirroring metal that I knew would go great with the mirroring foil I had brought from my studio. I was collecting Metasequoia cones and trying to find most of the trees in Salzburg. They are planted as a single tree (2-3 trees maximum) in almost every park or private gardens, like the University Botanical Gardens or St. Peter’s Church garden (last picture in the carousel).
I found some old drawers in a fabulous 1856 armoire, which had been made in the Alps, in Kleinarl, for somebody called Maria Dutterin. We came across this piece in the apartment we were renting from our lovely host in Salzburg, Dr. Herbert Köstler, who accepted my proposal to use some of the pieces of the armoire for my project. He even came (by bike during a thunder storm) to see the exhibition during the Open Studios. Thank you, Herbert! Grüss dich!
Based on the linear model of the Hellbrunn Palace garden, which also appeared in the portrait of the archbishop-prince, Markus Sittikus von Hohenems, the resident of this palace (see first photo below), I envisioned a space in which the cones and other plant material would be laid out.
Second week went fast because everybody was in work-mode and trying to finish an art installation in 2-weeks, which is very hard thing to do. I loved seeing how focused everyone was and feeling like part of a collective.
Iris Murray, an artist from London, organised a picnic to celebrate our time at the Summer Academy and to get ready for the final day, Open Studios (31 July), when there was free entry to visit all the classes.
For the Open Studios, I managed to finish 2 installations: Metasequoia in Metalabyrinth and Fossil beach.
Fossil beach was an assemblage of a screen printing board in which I stuck Metasequoia cones and a metal tray on which I fixed Metasequoia cones using clay.
My main installation, Metasequoia in Metalabyrinth, was inspired by the model of the Hellbrun Palace Garden represented here as the reliquary of the remains of a tree that is going extinct. I created the garden in order to trap the cones, to suggest their isolation and their lack of genetic variability. Each cone, leaf, branch, seed, drifting apart from each other on separate islands on the surface of the water made of mirrored foil, reflecting each other as clones, replicating in a labyrinth from which they cannot escape.
I talked to some visitors about the meaning behind my work and visited the other classes of archival research, screen printing, performance, painting, jewelry, mending. Below are some pictures from the event and a part of the artworks created by the artists who took part in the course After Eden: Art With and Against the Garden.
Photo credit: © Mira Turba, Sorina Tomulețiu, Camil Băncioiu, Maie Lievano Loynes
It was a very inspiring period at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts and I hope to return there someday. I met some incredible people and planned for the uncertain future.
I encourage all that seek to grow as artists to take the classes of the Summer Academy. There are calls for applications each year and also lots of scholarships. Follow their website for further details: www.summeracademy.at/en. My scholarship was from tranzit organisation: https://tranzit.org/en.