Forest, Not Football

We learned about FOR FOREST in May, when Littmann unveiled imagery for the installation. He was inspired directly by Max Peintner's drawing The Unending Attraction of Nature (1970-71), which depicts people in a crowded amphitheater "watching" a forest rather than a football match, with a skyline of towers and smoke-belching factories on the horizon. Reality has caught up to the social and environmental commentary of Peintner's drawing, such that Littmann's three-dimensional realization of it is clearly a commentary on 21st century climate change and our passivity in the face of what is arguably the largest crisis humanity has ever faced. 

The installation opened at 2pm on September 8 and can be visited for free from 10am until 10pm until October 27, 2019. Consisting of 300 trees, some as large as six tonnes, the installation is meant to resemble a Central European mixed forest and should change colors over the course of its seven-week run, when SK Austria Klagenfurt plays its home matches elsewhere. Littmann worked with Swizerland's Enea Landscape Architecture on planting the trees, which will be transplanted elsewhere in Klagenfurt after October as permanent reminders of FOR FOREST and its warning of humanity's destruction and depletion of nature.