LEON EIXENBERGER

APPLICATION FOR EIB INSTITUTS' ARTISTS’ DEVELOPEMENT PROGRAMME

References familiar with my work:

Olafur Eliasson olafur@olafureliasson.net (www.olafureliasson.net)

Sabine Hornig sabine@sabine-hornig.de (www.sabine-hornig.de)

A filmic garden

The filmic garden is a concept attempting to sculpt with a new spatiality that humans influence on on the
ecosystem opens up to the field of garden planing.

Having passed a tipping point, our natural system is now (also in this moment) moving from a thousands of
years long phase of relative balance into a time of transformation. A new continuity solidifies itself in our
consciousnesses: An ongoing change, who's end we can not foresee. It transcends into our lives and of self
definition. It is here that my interest starts. I want to ask, what does it mean, when the cyclicality in our
concept of nature as it appears in daily life falls. In a literal sense my children and and the generations that
follow them, will experience different winters and other springs, their cities will be inhabited by new plants
and migrated animals, their organisms themselves will be part of a differently composed Gaia.

What interests me, grows on the level of experiences and memory. I believe that culture is rooted in the
trauma of being in the world, which is the trauma of entanglement in an ecological system. This determination
has now been radically altered without us yet having developed the intellect and the emotional constitution to
understand it. My work aims to be a proposal on which we can start to examine this shift of paradigms with
our intuition.

My proposal is a work that will enfold in the time of over some hundred years. During the stay in Luxembourg
I want to focus on the construction of a model and research towards that project which will result in a video
work and an installation. The core of the idea is a garden that is composed out of plants that will step by step
be affected by climatological and other ecological human caused change and therefore grow alter or disappear.
The garden will change its composition during its life time entirely. Every 5 to 20 years it will be different
garden.

It is a consequent reaction to the axis of linear time, that climate change introduces to garden planing. This
subvert the formerly exclusively cyclical narratives that were built into gardens. I imagine the announcement,
planing and realization of such a garden to be a strong narrative to host the discussion around climatological
responsibility and especially introduce the notion of a feedback experience possibility. The ecosystem's change
will be directly made visible by this garden. In the best case the garden will be someone to help us relate our
body and our memory to the global collective effort that finds to balance these processes. In the worst case it
will become a memorial to a temporal phlegmatism on the expense of many lives.

I would be honored to develop this work in a mentor relationship to Mirosław Bałka, since I think his
experience based language could help me understand my work better and become an ally for future thoughts.