Garden of Moving Time
What can we learn with the cycles of life
on a school meadow?
Garden project and open air learning space in the framework of
Bad Ischl Salzkammergut European Capital of Culture 2024
Opening: 27. June 2024, 15:00 & 28. June 2024, 10:00
Location: HLW Bad Ischl, Kaltenbachstraße 19, 4020 Bad Ischl

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From 2022 to 2024, a semester-based, artistic-pedagogical process and open air learning space is being cultivated on the grounds of the HLW Bad Ischl. The artists Daniela Brasil and Sophie Krier are developing the Garden of Moving Time in dialogue with teachers, students and related experts and initiatives. The project is produced by <rotor> Centre for Contemporary Art in the framework of Bad Ischl Salzkammergut European Capital of Culture 2024.

About the project
Küchenwiese (meadow adjacent to the kitchen) is the name given to an outdoor area that is located between one of the school buildings and the Sissi Park, also riverbank to the Kaltenbach and Traun water bodies. Which kinds and ways of learning can a plot of land host? Which (past & future) forms of life can it enable, protect, and give a voice to? Can it become a space for the collective self-realisation of a school community?

Rooted in the concept of care, which plays a central role in the student’s education at the HLW (a secondary school for economy, social management and care), the Garden of Moving Time is about reclaiming our relation to Earth-time understood as time to recenter and replenish ourselves – as opposed to time as measure of production. In the garden, broken relations with vegetal, animal, mineral and ancestral worlds can be repaired, across time and perceptions. What is the time of the school, the time of the body, the time of the garden? Underpinning the design is the intention of taking the time to care, and healing by embracing natural time.

In 2022, the first conversations among the project partners started. From 2023 on, Daniela Brasil and Sophie Krier introduced process-based participatory art, hands-on workshops and seasonal semester exercises, thereby extending their art practice to the school curriculum. Students and teachers were invited to connect to the cycle of life: learning about regenerating soil, and more-than-human companion- and kinship. For instance, visual soil analysis using the vernacular technique of chromatography revealed the presence, and absence, of soil life at the site of the garden-to-be.

Around Summer Solstice 2024, the garden will be handed over to the school community with a blessing ceremony and cultural programme, bringing together the garden’s caretakers, users, neighbours and partners.

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Workshop in early summer: 28. - 30. June


As part of the early summer workshop, lots of things were tried out
on the Küchenwiese site.


The various groups planned, dug, planted, explored,
collected, documented...


One group worked on a sign for the future garden.

Soil meets concrete.

A pupil tries out the function of the ground sundial with her body.

Farewell to the old lime tree, which had to be felled in the course of
the summer as its core has died.


Together, they thought intensively about the future garden on the kitchen lawn.


Trying out the space requirements for a future open-air classroom.

Vegetable seedlings were planted, the yield of which would later be used in the school
kitchen of the HLW.


To ensure that the plants grow well over the summer, an automatic watering system was installed.

Workshop in late summer: 13. - 14. September


A lot has grown in the garden during the summer. A lot died too. Part of the workshop involved
taking note of this.


Freshly harvested chard.


The ridge bed after the harvest.


The students prepared seasonal dishes using vegetables from the garden with guidance from
the school kitchen teachers.


There were spreads, salads, drinks and other tasty treats.


Eating the prepared meals together was an opportunity to share time.


In the garden, pieces of the olf lime tree were arranged in the area of the future wild zone.


The artists Sophie Krier and Daniela Brasil discussed the designs for the Garden of Moving Time
with the pupils.


Pictures and plans were viewed together and discussed animatedly.


Daniela Brasil and Sophie Krier.
All photos: Pia Fronia

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Credits

The Garden of Moving Time is artistically realized by Daniela Brasil & Sophie Krier and is created in close cooperation with dedicated teachers, students of the HLW Bad Ischl and numerous project partners from the region and beyond. The project was initiated by Birgit Lurz, Anton Lederer, Margarethe Makovec, Rainer Posch, Karl Rossmann, Wolfgang Schlag, and is produced by <rotor> Centre for Contemporary Art in the framework of European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl Salzkammergut 2024.

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