This football stadium is now the home to a living forest

As the clock ticks on, the urgency to stem the threat of climate change intensifies. Deforestation has become a global crises as the rate of trees lost to agriculture and destroyed by fires increase at an alarming rate, threatening oxygen levels. Creating awareness of the seriousness of this threat and the need for planting more trees is part of the solution.

Swiss curator, Klauss Littmann, is doing exactly that with his project, For Forest:  The Unending Attraction of Nature, converting the Wörthersee stadium in Klagenfurt, Austria, into a temporary native European forest.

This month, around 300 trees, many fully grown and some weighing nearly 13,227 lbs, will transform the stadium’s existing Astroturf and will be the country’s largest public art installation ever.

The curated forest was developed in partnership with Enea Landscape Architecture, showcasing several species, including silver birch, alder, aspen, white willow, field maple, and common oak. Sourced from three European nurseries: Italy, Germany and Belgium, it took the team 22 days to “plant” the public art installation once the trees arrived in Austria.

Littmann’s arrangement of the trees in The Unending Attraction of Nature is inspired by a drawing of the same name by Austrian artist Max Peintner, seen by Littmann several decades ago. The drawing, created in 1970, portrays a harrowing future, where infrastructure imposes upon nature surviving in its rightful space. Littmann hopes these native central European trees will attract local wildlife, thereby breathing new life into a familiar, pre-existing space and focusing the public’s attention on the fragility of existing forests.

“With this art intervention I would like to challenge our perception of nature and sharpen our awareness of the future relationship between nature and humankind,” Littmann told Artnet News. “Nature, which we now take for granted, might someday only be found in specially assigned spaces, as is already the case with zoo animals.”

The stadium has seating for 30,000 spectators and visitors to this living art pop-up can view the panorama of trees from various angles around the stadium and experience the trees during daytime or in the evenings by floodlight. The natural seasonal color change of the leaves as they leaves change from summer to autumn should be spectacular

The Unending Attraction of Nature living art installation is free of admission fees and open every day from September 8 to October 27, after which it will be transferred permanently to a public site nearby, thereby minimizing the carbon footprint to transport the trees.

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