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Back to Nature??

20.07.2025
15:00   to 18:00 Uhr

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  • Symposium "Back to Nature???; Image: Square bales of hair stacked high in the centre of the picture, sky above, grass below and earth with scattered straws in the foreground; Photo: Eike Berg

Program

Sunday, 20 July 2025
3 p.m.: Welcome by Eike Berg, Director of the Kunstforum
3:10 p.m.: Miriam Lewandowsky: Wastelands? Culture and affect spaces in the countryside, followed by a discussion
3:55 pm: Coffee break
4:05 pm: Björn Vedder: Das Befinden auf dem Lande. Verortung einer Lebensart, followed by discussion
4:50 pm: Coffee break
5 pm: Talk with the artists Margit Greinöcker and Gerlinde Miesenböck about their works in the exhibition Stadt - Land - Wandel
5:30 pm: Panel discussion

Free participation


The symposium Back to Nature?? deals with the relationship between city and countryside. We want to trace the changing nature of this relationship and how it is reflected in art, and open up a discussion about the current state of this relationship. What about the old partnership in which the countryside feeds the city and the city protects the countryside? How strong is the cultural alienation that has been noticed since industrialisation really? Isn't there also a longing for each other, i.e. a love of the country in the city and a desire for the urban in the countryside? And in which images is all this expressed? The participants are the artists Margit Greinöcker and Gerlinde Miesenböck, who are exhibiting at the Schafhof at the same time, the art historian Mirjam Lewandowsky and the author Björn Vedder.

Berlin-based art historian Mirjam Lewandowsky, together with colleagues from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, has investigated the countryside as an affective space and describes in her research when people feel at home in the countryside. How do feelings of belonging and identity arise? How do connections and demarcations come about? In short: How does the countryside view itself and the city?

The art historian and author Björn Vedder from Herrsching adopts the opposite perspective and examines the city dwellers' love of the countryside and how they feel there. He also traces forms of rural life in the city and more general forms of provincialisation. Are town and country really so strictly separated or are the two, mentally, not moving ever closer together?

In her work, Gerlinde Miesenböck, Austrian artist who lives in Upper Bavaria, takes a photographic look at the death of farmers and shows the consequences of the abandonment of farms for the country and its people. In her work, Austrian artist Margit Greinöcker conceptually explores the transformation of a house and its inhabitants in Linz by recording their traces with cleaning rags and transforming them into images. Both artists will talk about their work and how it came about.

Books on the subject have been published by the speakers:

  • Birgit Althans , Mirjam Lewandowsky , Fiona Schrading und Janna R. Wieland, Wastelands? Kultur und Affekträume auf dem Land, Berlin 2025.
  • Björn Vedder, Das Befinden auf dem Lande. Verortung einer Lebensart, Hamburg 2025.