PARASITES OF FRAGMENTED GARDENS negotiates the interpretation and appropriation of nature in accordance with capitalist and primarily western (ideal) ideas: dysfunctional landscapes and ecosystems that represent harmony and idyll, health and wholeness on the surface without developing ecological relevance and biodiversity. The starting point for Kluss' research is a 500-year-old tree, a natural monument in the place where the artist grew up. Due to the expansion of roads and the subsequent acid rain, the fungus system in the ground collapsed a few years ago, which forms the symbiotic basis of life for the tree. Due to the historical significance of the tree, it was decided to open the soil around the tree with a jackhammer and inject the required mushrooms directly into the roots with around 400 syringes. The actually dead landscape remains alive for human perception on a purely visual level - the ecological wound is overwritten and made invisible.
In PARASITES OF FRAGMENTED GARDENS, garden fences and thorn tendrils become alive, they drag themselves through a stage-like installation in an intermediate stage of being subject and object, of emancipation and subordination. The tendrils appear fragmented and broken. They arrange themselves into a structure that can be seen both as a whole and as a composition of individual parts. Fences that are rigid become zoomorphic, elude their limiting functionality and are detached and seemingly lost in the room. In front of a curtain, like a theater stage, there is a screen that shows changing still lifes in an empty white room. The landscapes are generated from scientific 3D scans, which are used, for example, to monitor dying coral reefs or from photogrammetry by private nature lovers and generic CGI 3D models.
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