As part of the exhibition Blue Grass along the Rivers – Pasto azul a lo largo de los ríos by Olaf Holzapfel and Guido Yannitto
The exhibition curated by Christine Nippe by Berlin-based documenta artist Olaf Holzapfel together with his Argentine colleague Guido Yannitto, who lives in Buenos Aires, evokes associations with nature. The river and the grass. The flowing and the serial. The river brings together different sources. Standing on the bank, the water passes us by. It is difficult to grasp where it begins and where it ends. Everything is in motion. Local influences mix together and cannot be fixed. The longing for nature seems to become more urgent the more humans feel their alienation and their confinement. Yet the cultural and historical contrast between nature and city is questioned in the exhibition. It is about the connections and fluxes of apparent opposites: City and rural areas, Europe and the global South, craftsmanship and the visual arts, grids and errors, material and knowledge. Holzapfel and Yannitto work with natural materials such as textiles, wood, straw and hay, which are presented in the exhibition as installations. They always work with and in relation to the cultural histories and contexts, materials and techniques of places, so that their works create linking lines and networks between Argentina and Germany. Both are interested in the landscape, urban grids, paths and forms of knowledge, lost textile histories, the interaction between craftsmanship and the visual arts – and it is a matter of predicting what new models might emerge in view of the historical forgetting between city and rural areas. How might the local ecologies, the forms of exchange of tomorrow look like?