Ronald Kolb
Post-Exhibitionary Practice

https://www.m1-hohenlockstedt.de/en/kuratieren/m1-kuratieren-202526/der-unsichtbare-garten/

Der unsichtbare Garten (Hohenlockstedt)
Part of Art as Ecological Practice (2025–26)
Curated by Ronald Kolb

An art project by Camilla Berner.

A garden is usually understood as a piece of land shaped according to human intentions. Plants are selected, arranged, supported or removed in relation to ideas of beauty, usefulness and order. Camilla Berner’s Der unsichtbare Garten (Hohenlockstedt) began by turning attention towards what escapes these plans: the plants that emerge from seeds already present in the soil and grow without having been deliberately planted.

The project invited residents of Hohenlockstedt and neighbouring towns to look at their gardens differently. Instead of treating spontaneous vegetation as disorder or “weeds,” participants gathered these plants into bouquets, arranged them and photographed them against simple backgrounds. Each image recorded a particular place, season and way of seeing.

A Distributed Garden Portrait
First realised around Copenhagen in 2001, the project was continued and transformed in Hohenlockstedt through collaboration with gardeners and participants from Bokelrehm, Wacken, Itzehoe, the Wilstermarsch and other nearby places. Over the summer, new bouquets entered the exhibition at M.1, allowing it to grow from month to month.

The project developed outside the institution before returning to it. Private gardens became distributed sites of artistic production, while participants decided which plants deserved attention and how they should be arranged. Their photographs created a collective portrait of the region that did not depend upon panoramic landscape views. The local environment appeared through close observation of plants often overlooked beneath our feet.

The bouquets were produced by Dorothea Buck, Gesche Cordts, Silke Frauen, Frauke Greuel, Julia Günther-Borstel, Wiebke Habbe, Susanne Heimrath, Dorothea Heinrich, Daniela Mandel, Anke and Esther Mellin, Isolde Nagel, Ines Pretzlaff, Gretel Rüping, Christine Sarau, Gunda Schanze, Astrid Senne-Sachau, Carola Schülke, Marie-Louise Schümann, Thekla Solleske, pupils from class 5a at the Wilhelm-Käber-Schule Hohenlockstedt, Birgit Warmuth and Katrin Rickert.

Against Homogeneity
The growing installation was inaugurated during the Summer Assembly and reopened during the Fall Assembly with the bouquets produced in July and August. The accumulation of images revealed seasonal changes as well as different approaches to gardening. No single photograph represented the region; the work emerged through the variation between many situated contributions.

A regional seed bag containing documented wild plants extended the project from observation to potential action. Presented with suggestions for biodiversity-friendly gardening and space for a small personal seed bank, it invited visitors to carry the work into other gardens.

Der unsichtbare Garten did not oppose human cultivation to a supposedly pure nature. Instead, it asked how gardening might become more attentive to plants’ own capacities to arrive, persist and form unexpected communities. The bouquets became poetic arguments against monoculture and homogeneity. They made visible a diversity that was already present, but that habitual ideas of order had taught us not to see.