Klaus Littmann’s Arena for a Tree

If you happened to be floating in the air high over the Austrian city of Klagenfurt sometime in the early autumn of 2019, you might have noticed a rather strange sight underneath you – a large football stadium, empty of fans and players, with a forest of trees occupying the center of the pitch. This was For Forest, the work of Klaus Littmann, a Swiss curator who planted these trees (299 in total) in an abandoned stadium as a memorial to nature in our present time. The subject matter itself – the domination of nature, the isolation of the individual vis-a-vis this domination – is nothing particularly novel, but the scale of the execution struck a chord, and Littmann’s “intervention” took the art world by storm, drawing crowds to Klagenfurt and prompting a swarm of auxiliary exhibits, including conferences, photography series, and a short film.

Littmann’s follow-up project, Arena for a Tree (27 April – 24th May 2021), presented by the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger constitutes something of a tightening of the aperture he established in his 2019 work.  In collaboration with Schnetzer Puskas Ingenieure and Swiss landscape architect Enzo Enea, Littmann has installed a miniature wooden amphitheater surrounding a single tree in a square in Basel, Switzerland. As with his forest in a stadium, nature is isolated from a broader contiguous landscape and surrounded instead by an architecture constructed for human spectatorship. However, whereas in Littmann’s earlier work the juxtaposition read as an indictment of the distance between humans and nature, Arena for a Tree seems designed specifically as a reconstitution of that distance. The single tree is set apart to invite its audience to consider it as a work of art in its own right. The arena itself takes structural cues from the design of the tree, with an irregular outer shape formed by a mesh of bands that depict the annual rings of a tree. The arena can fit up to 50 people (probably less in Cronazeit), and visitors can engage with the tree at an intimate distance, from which they will be able to study its texture, the delicacies of its bark and leaves.

In tandem with the Arena for a Tree installation, Littmann has curated an exhibition titled Tree Connections (11 May – 11 July 2021), which includes over 70 works of art that engage with (you guessed it) our arboral neighbors. The exhibition spans from the 19th century to the present day, with special emphasis on 20th century works, including pieces from Sol Lewitt, Christo, and Joseph Beuys, who Littmann himself studied under in the 1970s. The pieces on view are drawn almost exclusively from private Swiss collections, in an effort to promote the local art ecosystem and also lower the show’s carbon footprint.

By Moses Allan Hubbard