In Klagenfurt, Austria, a football stadium awoke transformed into a forest.
The Swiss curator Klaus Littmann had carried the idea around in his head for decades: to take a dystopian drawing from 1970 by Austrian artist Max Peintner and turn it into reality. That work imagined a future in which people would have to sit in grandstands to observe a forest, as if nature were something that existed only in designated spaces. In September 2019, that imagined future was installed literally on the pitch of the Wörthersee Stadion.
Nearly 300 trees of Central European species —birches, alders, poplars, oaks— were transplanted onto the pitch where SK Austria Klagenfurt used to play. Some were 14 meters tall and weighed up to six tons. No one could enter the forest: visitors could only observe it from the stands, just as in the original drawing. For 50 days, more than 200.000 people queued to look at trees from seats designed for watching goals. When the exhibition closed, each tree was replanted on nearby land, transformed into a permanent living sculpture.
