Battlefield

Battlefield is an artwork by Gabriella Hirst, a garden of plants whose officially registered cultivar names reference theatres of war, armed conflict and the military. The plant varieties were bred and given these names over the last 500 years by various nurseries and individual breeders, for example, Peony ‘Victoire de la Marne’ (registered and named in 1919), Rosa polyantha ‘Dunkerque’ (1950), Rosa floribunda “Atombombe” (1953). Hirst has been researching, assembling and tending to these plants since 2014 in the community gardens of the Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin, as part of a durational project questioning how the cultural memory of violent events is ‘gardened’. The histories represented in the Battlefield garden are weedy, overgrowing, and rhizomatic. As a long-term project requiring constant pruning, winter-care, pricking-out, sowing and reaping, the Battlefield project addresses entanglement of care and dominance in both western gardening practice and the historiography of war. The Battlefield publication includes an index of the stories behind every plant in the Battlefield living garden archive, including excerpts from email correspondence with plant societies, gardening blogs, horticultural archives, plant care tips, personal anecdotes and speculations alongside compiled ephemera and research material gathered from the Battlefield project from 2014 to the present day, in its current expanded installation at the Gedenstätte Augustaschacht, Ohrbeck. It features essays by curator and researcher Anja Lückenkemper and Gabriella Hirst, and a poster-dust jacket of the planting guide of Battlefield as installed at the Kunsthalle Osnabrück in 2022-23.

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