Nils Norman :
From Gasoline to Sugar Beet

The sculptures developed by British artist Nils Norman for the Lower Austrian Garden Show are disguised as a visitor guidance system, as seemingly innocent traffic signs pointing in various directions at crossings. Visually, they hardly differ from the official signs whose environment they share. It gets interesting, though, when one begins to read these signs: one arrow points towards nuclear energy, the other towards Iran. Here’s the way to water energy, over there the way to Brazil. And geophysical energy is located somewhere behind the Emirates. As a concept artist and universal utopian, Norman—who studied painting at the prestigious St. Martin’s School of Art and was an assistant to the noted painter Gerhard Richter—treads the various paths and new, as yet unknown directions that energy production might take in the future. With his directional arrows he creates confusion and disorder among the strolling visitors, and even the free map is not much help: it serves merely to articulate the conflict-laden situation towards which we are headed. Infinitely many questions lie barren, unanswered, in the thicket of energy producing countries, expensive raw materials and the many variants of alternative energies. With his metaphor of chaos, Norman refers to the permanent oil crisis and to the hope that rises from the sugar beets in those regions capable of growing them.
"I would like to claim public space for other, for economic reasons," says the artist, who builds tree houses from found trash and then networks them at lofty heights to form 'Sky Villages,' airy monuments to civil disobedience. "For me, the occupation of public space bears within it a lot of highly interesting, radical potential!"
(Brigitte Huck)