Lois Weinberger (1947–2020) created influential works of art that resonate widely and remain especially significant for landscape architects. Growing up on a farm in Tyrol, surrounded by repetitions of natural processes to which rituals and traditions attune, he developed an understanding of the nature–culture relationship observed from the periphery. Before devoting himself fully to art, Weinberger worked as a blacksmith. Influenced by the social movements of the 1970s, avant-garde groups, Land Art, and Surrealism, he began in the late 1980s to pioneer the discourse of ecology and non-human agency—long before these became “domestic” themes in art.
“The more we are able to ‘make’ nature, the less we get part of it.”
His focus on the ruderal—rudis, wild and artless, evading strict human control where cracks appear—was a way to see nature beyond cultural concepts. Time, dynamics, emergence and death are its most concrete manifestations—together with stones, chickens, cars, or dragons, which all coexist rhizomatically in the world. In a 2010 interview for Antennae, which Franziska Weinberger kindly pointed to, he stated: “The more we are able to ‘make’ nature, the less we get part of it.”
This year, Markus Heltschl released the film, Lois Weinberger – Ruderal Society. Heltschl calls it less a documentary than a portrait, a meditation about him and his work: “I know Lois Weinberger from his early days as an artist. He grew up just 20 km away from the little town I lived in. We wrote scripts and worked on more than one film together. In his early days he was also an actor in feature films and theatre. He was able to do a lot of different things: he was also a poet and a gardener, as he was an outstanding artist and pioneer.
About capturing transience, it is not my intention to analyze because film is a statement – and a language – in itself. You have to watch it, that’s all.”
Ruderal Society
Weinberger’s open-air studio-garden on the outskirts of Vienna, called the Ruderal Society, a “perfectly provisional” area—unfinished and above the ordering—was situated on the post-industrial grounds of a former mirror factory. Weinberger often used a mirror metaphor when observing how society sees nature as its chance for self-reflection. That fallow land became an image of becoming, a reservoir of plants available for transfers to projects elsewhere. Portable Gardens (plastic bags with soil), Ruderal Enclosures (ripping open asphalt), and Wild Cubes (spontaneous vegetation enclosures) are perhaps the most direct and striking expressions of his thought. Yet the closer we look, the more complex images emerge.
Portable Garden, 1994 / 2004. Liverpool Biennial.
Ruderal-Enclosure. Salzburg Festival Summer, 1993.
Credits: sponsored by Josef Neuhauser.
Wild Cube – Ruderal Enclosure, 1998/1999. Neue Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Universität, Innsbruck. High-yield steel, spontaneous vegetation, 40 × 4 × 3.70 m. Architecture: Henkel & Schreieck. Curated by Georg Schöllhammer. Photographs: Gerbert Weinberger.
Poetic Politics
At documenta X in 1997, Weinberger planted abandoned rail tracks with plants from his garden, as well as neophytes from Southern and Southeastern Europe. The work acted as a political statement on migration, borders, and connections, using plants as living examples that “native” has nothing to do with nature. Nearly three decades later, it still resonates. As if anticipating debates on broader personhood, in 2010, Weinberger said it could be beneficial for our situation of sharing the planet if we granted plants a soul.
What is beyound plants is at One with Them . Kassel documenta X, 1997.
Ruderal Society Area II. Studio, Mirrorfactory in Lower Austria, 2004–.
His critique of “ecosystem services” is equally sharp, citing Gregory Bateson’s dismissal of “economic man” with his calculating mind as the dullest of all: “The notion of service in respect to nature highlights the totalitarian, economic view of anything and everything. How could a chicken only be imagined as a service provider?”
His process can also be understood as internal decolonisation: dismantling imposed frames, such as that of the hedged garden. For Weinberger, the garden was not a closure but a study of a system—a microcosm allowing insight into larger systems and, if observed without bias, opening onto other sub-systems and the foreign.
“Fallow grounds are places where boundaries show themselves as something in motion / something uncertain – places which have reached a point where one can speak neither of a beginning nor of an end nor of a standstill”.
Weinberger drew inspiration from ethnopoetics, non-canonical world poetries, folklore, and linguistic structures. Rejecting hierarchies, he sought openings towards the transgressive. He played with botanical names, paralleling them to human qualities. He combined found objects, soil, scraps, and “invisible nature” into Home Voodoo sculptures that unveiled “overlaps between reality and unreality”.
Ruderal Society Area II. Studio, Mirrorfactory in Lower Austria, 2004–.
What Weinberger finds is an aesthetics of truth, or reality as it is. His approach to art was to work with found objects and chance, exposing the poetics of reality rather than producing it. Working on the outskirts, in abandoned, freed lots and cultural residues, Weinberger went beyond found conditions: he amplified and curated this second-degree nature, dopo storia in Pasolini’s words.
Ruderal Society – Excavating a Garden, 2017. Kassel, documenta 14. Photo: Axel Schneider and Studio Weinberger.
Lois Weinberger’s List of Titles
On the list of films Weinberger last selected for an exhibition, Basics, at Vienna’s Belvedere 21, curated by Severin Dünser, was Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev—but we might also think of Stalker. Similarly, Derek Jarman’s Blue resonates with his Prospect Cottage Garden. On his reading list, besides Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, numerous titles point to a ceaseless curiosity for cultures, unfinished poetics, and migratory spaces in-between.
– Pasolini, P. P. Heretical Empiricism [Freibeuterschriften] – Pasolini, P. P. Gramsci’s Ashes [Gramsci’s Asche] – Heidegger, M. Building, Dwelling, Thinking in Lectures and Essays II – Genet, J. Fragments – Lévi-Strauss, C. Tristes Tropiques – Lévi-Strauss, C. The Savage Mind – Fichte, H. The House of Mina in São Luiz de Maranhão – Barthes, R. Empire of Signs – Wilson, E. O. The Diversity of Life – Zander, F. et al. Plant Identification Guides – Schubert, G. & Wagner, K. Botanical Dictionary – Hall, S. Race and Cultural Identity. Selected Writings, Vol. 2 – Leiris, M. The Ethnographer’s Eye – Rätsch, C. Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants – Virgil. Georgics – Thoreau, H. D. Walden; or, Life in the Woods – Duerr, H. P. Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization – Bateson, G. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity – Riedl, R. The Strategy of Genesis – Schrödinger, E. What is Life? – Basford, K. The Green Man – Virgil. Eclogues / Bucolics – Virgil. Aeneid – Poems of Romanticism (anthology) – Sterne, L. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Warburg, A. The Snake Ritual – Cioran, E. M. The Fall into Time – Handke, P. Over the Villages – Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Films: – Tarkovsky, A. Andrei Rublev – Syberberg, H.-J. Hitler: A Film from Germany – Jarman, D. Blue
