TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Austrian football stadium turned into a forest
Change Size
General view taken on September 5, 2019 during a preview shows the temporary art intervention 'For Forest - The Unending Attraction of Nature' by Klaus Littmann at the Woerthsee football stadium in Klagenfurt, Austria. The installation, consisting of around 300 trees transplanted over the existing football pitch, will be open to the public from September 8 to October 27, 2019.
(APA/AFP/Gert Eggenberger)
T
he rustling of the wind through trees has replaced the referee's whistle at a football stadium in the Austrian city of Klagenfurt after an unusual art installation was revealed there on Thursday.
Almost the whole pitch of the 32,000-capacity Woerthersee stadium, which hosted some of the fixtures of the Euro 2008 tournament, has been covered in 300 trees.
The arresting installation, entitled "For Forest", was unveiled to the media on Thursday before being opened to the public on Sunday for a few weeks of bucolic wandering.
The transplanted forest is the brainchild of the Swiss artist Klaus Littmann who told reporters he wanted to create the image of "a forest that we have put in a totally new context".
"The contrast between the trees and the steel, concrete and glass -- you can't get better than that," Littmann said.
Read also: If we lose orangutans, we will lose forest too
Logistical challenges meant that bringing the vision into being was a "long and stony path", he said, adding that he had first suggested the project to city authorities six years ago.
"The moment that we're doing this in is uncanny," he said, pointing to the prominence that the climate crisis and the fires in the Amazon rainforest have gained in the media in recent months.
The installation has been supported by Klagenfurt's municipality and has been criticized by some as an extravagance.
The 300 trees of various different kinds -- aspen, Oaks, birches and larches -- were grown in nurseries and will be moved out of the stadium on October 27.
As for Klagenfurt's football team, who play in Austria's Second League, it will temporarily move to a smaller facility nearby.
