Lois Weinberger
In focusing on the relationship between “nature” and “culture,” Lois Weinberger is concerned with the “peripheral areas of perception.” His formal inventions and linguistic interventions address that place where the artificial and the natural interlock in order to lay bare a cultural process among the shifts and changes. Weinberger’s fundamental interest is not in an obviously visible nature and its lamentable destruction, the opposite of which would be found in “pristine nature,” but rather—in his words—in an “invisible / intellectual nature.” In his analytical yet experimentally poetic works,
Weinberger tracks down a sort of nature that has always been culturally coded, and for which he arrives at or invents the most varied forms of expression and media-based manifestations: as an archive, as writing, as a product of the lab, as a scientific image, as a found and altered object, as a quotation, as built space, as a special biotope, as photography or video. Weinberger works on the interlocking structures of the artificial and the natural in order to create finely differentiated interventions, shifts and changes. “On location, unnoticeable interventions should be carried out / occurrences / which could not really have taken place without human activity. Weinberger’s work centers on ruderal plant species, plants that are typically referred to as “weeds” and tend to establish themselves in places where conventional ideas of garden organization are inappropriate; one of their qualities is that they are particularly hardy. To Weinberger and his wife Franziska, who works together with him closely, ruderal plants are, as they put it, “artificial metaphors,” they “stand for the explosiveness of themes—from nutrition to the migratory processes of our era—for all of the systems that surround us. S.E.
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