Planetary Forest: Bring the Forest into the Garden relocates a piece of damaged forest floor into a botanical garden and calls the result a living sculpture. The material comes from a specific, documented site: an ecological disturbance area in the city forest of Rosbach vor der Höhe, Hesse, severely affected by the drought-driven forest dieback (“Waldsterben”) now widespread across Germany, where warming-driven drought stress has killed trees outright and left survivors newly vulnerable to bark beetle infestation. Kessler, dendrochronologist Claudia Hartl, architectural historian Clemens Finkelstein, and political scientist Claus Leggewie carried this regional forest soil, deadwood, and disturbed understory out of Rosbach and reconstructed it on a free-standing green area beside the newly built greenhouses of the Botanical Garden Giessen — Germany’s oldest botanical garden, founded in 1609.
The gesture is deliberately literal rather than metaphorical: what looks like a natural forest floor, fenced and staged in a garden built on “scientific and cultural-technical construction of worlds,” is in fact transplanted evidence of a real, ongoing ecological failure. As Kessler writes, “the supposedly natural forest is carried into the man-made world of the botanical garden,” where it functions “like a crack in the perfectly constructed reality” — sensitizing visitors to both forest dieback and to the garden’s own artificiality as a constructed representation of nature. The project began with guided forest walks in Rosbach with foresters and researchers, moved through a material transfer and installation process at the Botanical Garden Giessen (June 2022), and concluded with a bilingual (English/German) edited volume — contributions from Kessler, Finkelstein, Hartl, and Leggewie, plus botanical garden directors Holger Laake and Volker Wissemann — weaving forest walks, dendrochronological analysis of tree rings, and an essay on “forests of frequencies” and vibrational landscapes around the central sculpture.
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