This five day intensive workshop explores the possibilities of developing pictorial spaces within the medium of painting by taking Berlins Botanic Garden as a starting point for eutopian and dystopian ideas of a contemporary paradise.

The idea of the Garden of Eden as a botanical hortus conclusus is certainly one of the oldest utopian concepts of humanity. With its unattainable and ideal state it functions as projection space of fictitious origin as well as refuge or even sanctuary. Its ambiguous vision combines uncontrollable and even threatening sides of nature with cultivated and human-made aspects of wilderness, which finally lead us to one of the most central and existential topics of the present day: our undoubted conflicting relationship to nature. The ambivalence between floral formations and staged proliferations can be best experienced in the large tropical greenhouses of the European metropolises, to whose hustle and bustle they have always been an alternating concept.

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