The project GARTEN.MEIDLING – Urban Land Art als soziale Plastik (Urban Land Art as Social Sculpture) in the Wolfganggasse area in Meidling, Vienna’s twelfth municipal district, was initiated by Jutta Wörtl-Gössler together with artists from Turkey, Serbia, and Vienna in the form of five art gardens. Involving residents of adjacent buildings, Jutta Wörtl-Gössler laid out creatively designed “front gardens” reminiscent of the green of Gründerzeit alleys and founded the society “Garten Wolfganggasse.”
Together with the alley trees, today’s nearly thirty lots form a large common garden which offers itself as a friendly space to stay. In addition to gardening, the society also fosters neighborly exchange. The subjects of this participative model are individual expression, communication, integration, and responsibility. The garden project is affiliated with its cooperation partners, the Area Renewal Office of Meidling, the Municipal Department 42 – Parks and Gardens, and the Municipal District Office of Meidling.

Hans Wörtl: treibhauto
The car not only stands for the carelessness with which man deals with nature and is not only regarded as the main cause of global warming, the number one cause of death, and an indicator for the drifting apart of individuals whom it pretends to bring together. Whereas the car means movement through destruction, the project treibhauto (greenhauto) wanted to show how nature survived throughout so many millennia because it was able to see movement as growth. The microclimate of a car’s interior, which car drivers usually fight by parking their vehicles in a shady spot and turning on the air-conditioning, was to provide the basis for a greenhouse, which finally overgrew the car from inside and gobbled it up completely with ist fungi and pioneer species, shrubs, weeds, and useful plants.

Iris Andraschek / Hubert Lobnig: Tree under the Influence
An apple tree/pear tree was planted by the artists. Neighbors and other persons were asked to collect new grafts of fruit varieties for the tree each spring. The contributors’ names and their stories (a scion from grandmother’s or father’s orchard or from one’s “country of provenance,” one’s favorite apple, etc.) were written down, printed on small panels, and fastened to the tree with a photograph of the respective person. The tree turned into a tree of stories and social relationships.

Mira Dj*: my space your place
The textile installation or intervention in urban public space aimed at forging a bridge between virtual and real space and exploring the space in between. The project aimed at raising questions concerning people’s personal confines, to explore the bounds people set to themselves, to confront these with real material limits, and shed light on the responsibility for individual and collective spaces.

Fatih Aydogdu: Lale
Fatih Aydogdu’s installation referred to historical and social aspects of oriental and European garden cultures in conjunction with present-day issues, visualizing them in her (art) garden. It was the “turban flower” that brought about the first “stock market crash” and triggered a veritable economic crises in seventeenth-century Holland. The Ottoman word for tulip, “lale,” derives from the Persian “laleh.” Read from right to left “laleh” becomes “helal” (kosher). The word “lale”/“laleh” also comprises the same letters as the name of Allah: “alif,” “lam,” and “ha.” Some scholars maintain that this is the reason for the frequent appearance of the tulip in Ottoman art, and postulate a symbolic use of the motif.

Jutta Wörtl-Gössler: RosenGARTEN/enchanted (für Rosa Haag)
Jutta Wörtl-Gössler planted three climbing roses that would grow to nine meters tall and fastened them to an alley tree. Once a month, myths, fairytales, and family stories created a virtual RosenGARTEN. A space opened which also offered leeway for an exchange on more difficult subjects such as war experiences, migrant problems, diseases, and death. The storytellers followed the ways of oral tradition. The space was accessible for all people who wanted to tell their stories.