Tree Agent

Why maverick Swiss curator Klaus Littmann is growing a forest in an Austrian stadium.

- Sophie Lovell

This autumn, the Swiss art interventionist Klaus Littmann is filling a football stadium in the Austrian town of Klagenfurt with a full-grown forest. It is a free-access public art installation of Christo-like proportions that has had much of Austria buzzing for months.

Littmann is not new to large-scale public projects. In 2018, for example, he floated 12 giant ‘art planets’ by a range of international artists above the city of Basel, visible from miles around. Born in 1951 in Riehen, he studied in the 1970s at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Joseph Beuys and had his own gallery in Basel during the 1980s and 1990s, before turning his attention to ‘theme-oriented art exhibitions and interventions in the public arena’. He calls himself a ‘freelance mediator of contemporary art’, but actually prefers not to be pinned down by definitions: ‘When someone asks me: “Are you an artist?” I say: “No”, but if you don’t think like an artist, you couldn’t do these things.’