4. GREEN BELTS

Lois&Franziska Weinberger, Vienna

Green Belts is the title of a huge wall-cloth, 300x500cm long, specially created for this project by the Austrian artists Lois&Franziska Weinberger. A collage not only in the use of paint, markers and imprinted photographs, but also in the interweaving of a Belfast City map with botanical names of flowers and social and emotional descriptions. An associative work, which examines issues of urban existence, the prescribed and normative use of space and the relationship between nature and culture.

Their garden in Vienna, where they ‘cultivate endangered plants’, commonly regarded as weeds, is a departure point for most of Weinbergers’ projects, outdoor interventions, transportable gardens, drawings and films. Wild vegetation with its capacity to survive in the most hardy conditions and its anti-normative potential are often a metaphor for social structures and processes, observed and researched by the artists with nearly scientific attitude, but poetically translated into strong creative images.