Edit Oderbolz: Water Your Garden In The Morning

Curated by Elfi Turpin.

For a long time Water Your Garden In The Morning was a working title, a kind of intuitive pointer—or maybe a methodology that Edit Oderbolz applied to the conception and shaping of this exhibition. So we have to think of her starting each day by watering her garden—a domestic act of caring and observation that has her sowing ideas, checking their growth, watching them flower and intertwine, separating those that don’t “take” from those that are going to live and breathe at CRAC Alsace during the three upcoming months. Rubbing shoulders in this garden are ideas, concerns, artworks and artists that Edit Oderbolz shares with the place she’s taking over—ideas, concerns, artworks and artists from different eras and different parts of the world, but coexisting there in a dream garden.

Coexisting with Edit Oderbolz often raises the issue of habitat. In early eighteenth-century botany the term designated the context of a plant in its natural state, then was extended to include settings adapted to animal and vegetal species. It only came to signify the built environment as living space in the twentieth century, and it was not until the interwar years that a further shift saw the notion of “habitation”—previously tied to the “fact of inhabiting,” to an action rather than to architecture—take on the sense of living conditions. Thus the animal and vegetal worlds exited the word when modern architecture entered it. Maybe it’s at this critical spot that Edit Oderbolz is operating: where architecture separates classes, races and genders; where it standardises, organises and prioritises—night and day, man and woman, adult and child, interior and exterior, private and public—and where, conversely, certain bodies resist and affect it.

And so Edit Oderbolz focuses less on modern forms of habitat than on how they are experienced, apprehended, performed and subverted: on a layering of alternative spatial experiments in a dream garden where projects by Flávio de Carvalho(1) intertwine with vernacular works, Derek Jarman’s gardening diaries,(2) the brutalist skeleton of a public housing block in London or a snail-shaped scotch tape dispenser.

–Elfi Turpin, September 2018

(1) With the participation of Armando Andrade Tudela.
(2) Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman, Arrow, 1992.

Opening brunch: Sunday, October 14, 11:30am. Free shuttle from Basel, departure SBB Süd Station - Meret Oppenheim Strasse at 10:45am, return to Basel at 2pm.
RSVP and press contact: Richard Neyroud, r.neyroud [​at​] cracalsace.com

Water Your Garden In The Morning is organised with the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and Kunstkredit Basel-Stadt.

CRAC Alsace is a member of d.c.a and Versant Est.
CRAC Alsace is supported by: Ville d’Altkirch, Conseil Départemental du Haut-Rhin, Région Grand Est and DRAC Grand Est – Ministère de la Culture.