The cross-space installation »Intensivsimulation« is to be understood as integral part and prosecution of the ongoing research around the latent exoticisation of artificial turf in German speaking countries. Unlike in most European countries, artificial grass carpets are often sold in German DIY and Hardware stores with the names of paradisiacal islands such as Antigua, Bahamas, Bali, Capri, Corfu, Gran Canaria, Ibiza, La Gomera, Mallorca, Malta, Santorini and Sumatra. These nomenclatural retouchings of the goods are aimed at marketing the »Sehnsucht« for dreamy holiday destinations and represent a surrogate for heavenly places. Yet what happens when a square metre of Mallorca artificial grass is more expensive than a flight to Mallorca itself?
Based on the marketing strategies of artificial turf in German-speaking countries, the project raises questions about mass tourism, simulated ownership and ecology. In the process, a speculative space is created in which artificial grass carpets are observed and examined like green screens - green projection surfaces of postcolonial thinking.
Visitors are invited to enter the »Intensivsimulationen« »La Gomera« and »Capri« as inpatients. Through haptic, visual and auditory elements, a temporally and spatially condensed holiday is created in the form of an immersive, artificial space that cites referentially characteristic design elements of a beach holiday, an aeroplane and an emergency room, combining them in a semiotic interplay. Thus, stretchers and sunbeds are astonishingly similar in their design. Infusion stands are reminiscent of parasols from which the upper part has been removed. Likewise, the aircraft belt in this specific ensemble is reminiscent of fastening straps for operating tables. For this, just as in the medical context, curtains create a private space around the inpatient.
Illegally downloaded audio tracks and 360-degree photos stolen from Google function here as counterparts to the holiday locations embodied by the respective artificial grass carpets, giving shape to a verbal and spatial glitch installation.
The research examines and deconstructs the bourgeois norm of having front lawns. The historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari devotes several paragraphs to front lawns and their imperialist history in the book »Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow«. According to the author, this norm has its roots in the late medieval French and English aristocracy, which in the early modern period began to lay out lawns in front of their own castles. The front lawns required land and lots of labour, but they produced nothing of value: the fine lawns around the châteaux were accordingly a status symbol. When kings were overthrown and dukes guillotined in the late modern period, the new presidents and prime ministers kept the lawns. Parliaments, Supreme Courts as well as presidential residences increasingly proclaimed their power in a row of well-tended, green blades of grass. People thus identified the lawn with political power, social status and economic flourishing. Subsequently, the emerging middle classes in the 19th century embraced the lawn with enthusiasm, and as the Industrial Revolution spread the middle class and gave birth to the lawnmower and later the automatic lawn sprinkler, millions of families could suddenly afford their own patch of grass. In addition, the lawn found another, more practical use, functioning as a ground for sports such as football, tennis or baseball, which began their global triumph in the course of the last decades of the century. This exponentially strengthened the character of turf as a positive projection surface for dreams.
In this respect, artificial turf can be understood as a surrogate or cheapened simulation of an established, historically hardly questioned status symbol. Furthermore, artificially produced turf takes on a further connotation through its exoticisation in German-speaking countries, where it seems to imitate not only a symbol of financial prosperity but also paradisiacal holiday resorts in their entirety. Thus, the artificial grass carpet in its tendentious, two-dimensional form represents a cartographic attempt to depict a three-dimensional space in flattened/unwrapped form. As philosopher Sybille Krämer discusses in the talk »Digitalität und die Kulturtechnik der Verflachung« at re:publica 2019, the cultural practice of flattening creates an artificial space that can be surveyed, controlled and manipulated. We live in a three-dimensional world, but we are surrounded by artificial surfaces, Krämer said. The band of planar representational practices stretches from cave paintings and skin tattoos to the invention of images, graphs, diagrams, tables and maps and computer screens. In this respect, the arbitrary special nomenclature of artificial turf pushed by German DIY stores suggests an artificial form of representation of real places that embodies dreamy holiday destinations in an abstracted way, flattens them and turns them into purchasable products.
