the planting sticks are part of the last chapter of a series of activities by LandKunstLeben this year about the hachscharah place (the pre-war zionist gardening school) to be continued next year. Years ago not knowing about Hachscharah, Landkunstleben started to plant a garden, quite a big garden with a lot of local people on the dole combining gadening with site-specific art projects. It´s a long term project struggeling with an endless jungle of rules for the public funds (east german countryside is quite abandoned, native people don´t find work and are introverted, usually not much contact to those from the cities buying properties in peacefull nature). there are hardly any public structures apart from schools and administration. I came to the garden after years and was impressed by the variety of trees and plants, they were cooking and harvesting and decorating for a fest next day, creating the atmosphere of working together which is enthusiastic and neccessary for the countryside, but hardly existing any more. The Hachsharah place is 5 kilometers away from the garden, and slowly slowly I understood the complexity of what they do and of the subject (the levels of utopia, of nationalism and of repression), but also the actual part, the tender approach of the local and the citypeople to a certain view on / experience(?)of history. Of course far away from the officially designed museum-pedagogic style usually practiced in germany.
F.e. in the forties Clara Grunwald arranged a kind of hidden school for the children, who were not allowed any more to attend schools and she realised montessory methods there. During the actual project one of the artists held a series of workshops with kids, attempting to use her methods modified for those actual kids who supposedly have no idea that the ground they live on has such a variety of different levels/layers. (from a letter)