Almost 50 years after Joni Mitchell sang about putting a tree in a tree museum, a Swiss artist has set up a whole forest in a stadium to make a similar environmental point.
Basel-based Klaus Littmann installed 300 trees in a 30,000-capacity stadium in Klagenfurt in southern Austria, near the border of Italy and Slovenia.
“For many, because of the current situation, this represents a memorial as part of the climate change discussion,” he told Reuters at the exhibition in the lakeside city.
Mitchell’s 1970 song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ - and its refrain “They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot” - had a clear green message, suggesting that the world had become so developed that people had to go to museums to see nature.
{{/usCountry}}Mitchell’s 1970 song ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ - and its refrain “They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot” - had a clear green message, suggesting that the world had become so developed that people had to go to museums to see nature.
{{/usCountry}}Littmann did not mention the song but referenced another influence from the same year, a drawing by the artist Max Peintner “who in 1970 had the vision that one day, it could happen that we look at nature in designated areas only, for example in a crater architecture such as a stadium.”
The free exhibition opens on Monday and runs until October 27.
(This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.)
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