Migrants, nature partisans and wandering pioneer plants, plants and animals that thrive in areas developed by people, foraging paths and settlements, deforestation and weeds: if Lois Weinberger in his “field work“ employs the plant kingdom as a metaphor for the human world, the designations and fields of reference shimmer slightly between good and bad, between correct and incorrect.

Weinberger started with his ethnopoetical works as early as in the 1970s. They are the basis for his artistic examination of the space of nature and civilization. Lois Weinberger became internationally known through his contribution Das über Pflanzen/ist eins mit ihnen (That About Plants/Is One With Them) on the documenta X, 1997 in Kassel. In the middle of the city, he planted endemic pioneering plants and migrant species from Southand Southeast Europe. As a metaphor for the migration processes of our time this colorfully proliferating “city garden” quickly became one of the most popular works at the art show and also remained there after it ended.

The installation I-weed, YOU-weed, which Lois Weinberger designed for the lift tower of the Street Art Passage, is very site-specific, similar to his planting on the railway tracks in Kassel. As a work using script, the installation forges an artistic link to the tags, the graffiti and ephemeral comments that in particular mark the streets bordering Vienna’s 7th district and to which the Street Art Passage Vienna is thematically dedicated. Weinberger‘s work takes up both their writtenness and their proliferating, intoxicating aspects, and reflects them in the city-center culture space of the MuseumsQuartier Wien.

The idea for the work derives from an old plant book that reports on the enormous seed production of the Bilsenkraut (henbane): within five years, this herb could easily cover every bit of land on Earth. Lois Weinberger then started to conjugate the word Bilsenkraut (henbane) — thus Ichkraut, Dukraut, Eskraut, Wirkraut (I-weed, youweed, we-weed) and so forth — and to write it across the page. The form in English that has now been selected enriches the iridescence of the words with multiple meanings of the word “weed”, which has several meanings in German: weeding as an action, pest plant and marijuana. The form of the accurate conjunction also implies an appeal: anyone who wants can eradicate himself as a weed.

Text: Vitus Weh