Inés Lombardi’s project on Zimmermannplatz represents a dialectic piece of urban landscaping and garden design: a proliferating garden with a draw well, designed – quite untypically for public green-spaces – as a fragment. It is a garden of quotations, a dynamic setting of what seems like uncontrolledly luxuriating wild and cultivated plants, but based in fact on precise planning. Like the garden, the well is an assemblage of quotations. At first sight, it looks like a stone well with a brick edge and a wheel on which a rope runs holding the zinc bucket used for drawing water. A magpie, the emblematic bird of the Alsergrund district, sits on a log of wood on the edge of the well. However, none of the materials actually is what it seems to be: the well is a cast bronze sculpture with homogeneous surfaces; there is no difference between stone, brick, or zinc; and the magpie does not drink from the bucket but spouts water from its beak.

Lombardi’s intervention Ohne Titel (Projekt „Garten mit Brunnen“) (Untitled [project “Garden with Well”]) triggers a number of associations, but most of all, it is a flashback to the cozy interior courtyard of the typical Biedermeier house. The artist condenses a piece of history here, but with the artificiality of the garden – the element of abstraction – she deliberately undercuts any nostalgia for urban romanticism. She refers to the tectonic shift from the private to the public and, through the set-piece quality of “the garden” and “the well,” also points to the transformation that the square has undergone. This piece of an interior-courtyard garden that she “infiltrates” into the cityscape has something of a dream image that emerges amid the (over) planned functionalized traffic network at the Zimmermannplatz and, in its fragmentariness, gives visibility to something lacking. Lombardi successfully visualizes a paradox: time seems frozen here, encapsulated in the installed object of the well, and yet remains experienceable in the transitoriness of the garden.

Text: Silvia Eiblmayr