Gabriela Oberkofler, Jacob Strobel: Seeds & Seats

The collaborative installation "Seeds & Seats" creates a space for encounters: gentle through the growth of perennials, poetic through text fragments by Bertolt Brecht, inviting through lingering on chair classics of GDR design in the Lobgedicht area on Brückenstraße in Chemnitz.

Artist Gabriela Oberkofler, who was born in 1975 in Bolzano and lives in Stuttgart, and designer and university lecturer Jacob Strobel, who was born in 1978 in Würzburg and works in Schneeberg, have created an intervention in Chemnitzer Brückenstraße, for which individual pavement slabs were removed and the resulting geometric surfaces filled with humus. Oberkofler planted perennials modelled on the traditional farming culture of the Sarnthal Alps. Elder, catmint and flowering sage grow in the open squares - a garden with native and indigenous plant species that are said to have a healing and reconciling effect in Tyrol. The backrests of Strobel's classic EW 1192 chair, redesigned for outdoor use from hardwood by furniture designer Horst Heyder, are carved with text and word fragments from Brecht's poems of praise from his time in exile: "The safe is not safe" or "whose time has come" can be read here. They can be rearranged by moving the chairs.

Oberkofler and Strobel intervene where Brecht's poems of praise were transformed into five relief sculptures between 1968 and 1972 by the sculptors Joachim Jastram, Martin Wetzel and Eberhard Roßdeutscher on a state commission from the GDR. They are lined up on the pavement and are intended to convey motifs from the history of development towards a communist society in the formal language of socialist realism. With their emphasised educational message, they stand in the urban space as relics of the ideology of state socialism that has been overcome. In their contradiction to today's society and artistic form, they urge us to remain in dialogue with the past and our heritage - cautiously, poetically, invitingly between seats and seeds and constant recombination.