what is nature How is she – and what do you think of her? You will discover that in the Stapferhaus

The first surprise comes before I walk through the black curtain behind which the exhibition begins: “You can put your shoes and socks in the compartments there,” says the friendly employee. In fact, the exhibition «Nature. And us?” In the Stapferhaus in Lenzburg you use the most natural means of transport: barefoot.

And that makes sense. The soles of bare feet are successively confronted with very different surfaces: soft sand, smooth wood, cold metal, small stones, even slices of mushroom mycelium. It’s amazing how much the sense of touch and temperature perception reveal about the surface in question. It’s also amazing – this thought occurs to me as a city dweller who almost always wears shoes – how little you notice on the soles of your feet in everyday life. Artificiality as a filter that dampens sensory impressions.

This brings us to the subject of the exhibition. What is that actually, nature? What is our relationship with her? And whose is it?

Nature does not exist – there is only our imagination of it. We already experience this in the first room, which is about our understanding of nature. 147 objects from the collection show how we humans deal with nature: we fear, conquer, protect, sell, explore and organize. The example of the wolf shows us how nature serves as a projection screen for our fears; on the showcases with neatly arranged insects we see how it is categorized and hierarchical. And we see how scientific and economic developments – namely the Enlightenment and industrialization – have shaped our ideas about nature. Conclusion: It is culture that determines our understanding of nature.

For example, consider the passage in the Bible that commands mankind to subdue the earth: “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over all the beasts that move upon the earth.” While modern theologians try not to read this commandment as a license for the exploitation of nature, the divine instruction shows an understanding of nature in which nature appears primarily as a resource – and from which a development line leads to factory farming, rainforest deforestation and overfishing.

With this, the people – we have – have now put the planet in a critical condition. This is the message, impressively illustrated by 20 satellite images in vertical format in the center of the next room, along with a multitude of facts and figures laid out in black and white infographics. Here, for example, we see palm oil plantations in Indonesia, the sea of ​​houses in Tokyo, a gold mine in Australia – they all form patterns of abstract yet deceptive beauty from space.

Here we also learn things that we might rather not know. For example, that a broiler is fattened from 40 grams to two kilos within 37 days. Or that wild animals make up only four percent of the mammalian biomass, while humans and their livestock make up 96 percent. We see graphs on the consequences of climate change, on water consumption in cotton production and on the extinction of species in Switzerland.

The human impact on the earth is now so great that some geologists already see the current Holocene giving way to a new era – the Anthropocene, the ‘Age of Man’. The traces that humans now leave behind will last for thousands of years. The species that disappear through his work never come back. From this predominant and in fact destructive influence of humanity on the earth system arises their responsibility for the future of the planet, which they have not yet assumed: we are still anything but careful and responsible with natural resources.

But the exhibition is not content with showing man’s mistakes in dealing with nature. Eight pavilions are grouped around the central area, which illustrates the unpleasant facts, showcasing new, surprising perspectives, which the Stapferhaus team says are intended to “invite us to rethink our relationship with nature.”

For example, imagine that a river has rights. The radical reinterpretation of the legal principles underlying this idea has become a reality with a ruling by the Colombian Constitutional Court: the Rio Atrato has thus acquired the status of a legal person. This gives the local population, who see the river as a living being, legal instruments to take action against the pollution of their habitat.

Or imagine discovering the world as a fox. Following in the footsteps of veterinarian Charles Foster, who explored London on all fours from the perspective of an urban fox, this pavilion lets you crawl between rubbish bins at knee height and mimic a fox’s senses.

In the other pavilions you can get acquainted with the world of mushrooms or see on a monitor how the electrical voltage of a wired basil plant changes when you touch it. You will learn what kind of cosmos of bacteria, viruses, fungi and microorganisms live on and around us – the invisible microbiome without which we could not live at all. Or listen to the philosophical conversation between a lawnmower and a dog robot about what is natural.

The exhibition organizers – the team led by artistic director Sibylle Lichtensteiger and the Dutch agency Kossmanndejong – used the space between the pavilions for 17 large-scale nature projections on tulle. In interaction with 17 musical improvisations they create a sometimes spherical, poetic atmosphere. The multimedia power of the exhibition is particularly evident here and it is not surprising why the Stapferhaus received the “European Museum of the Year” award three years ago in 2020.

Throughout the course, visitors, who are given an electronic “compass” at the start, are repeatedly confronted with questions. They must take a position themselves and determine, for example, who the fire brigade should rescue first in the event of a fire: the people, then the pets and finally the livestock or everyone with the same priority. One of the four answers can be selected and saved using the compass; At the end of the passage, the visitor is then given an evaluation that positions them in a kind of clever spin between the four stereotypes ‘the carefree’, ‘the technology-loving’, ‘the holistic’ or ‘the informed’.

These four types are based on different worldviews about the relationship between humans and nature. For the “brutal” nature is there to be used and enjoyed; man cannot solve the problems of the world anyway. The “technology-loving” trust in human ingenuity, which should support nature and defuse threats. The ‘holistic’, on the other hand, see humans as an equal part of nature who need to step back and act in harmony with the environment. For the “informed” nature is a complex system in crisis that we can influence all the more positively the better we understand the problem.

In the last room, before the visitors receive the assessment of their answers, these four stereotypes debate for 20 minutes in a video installation and exchange their arguments. Then dancing points of light on the wall, representing his answers, lead the visitor out of the exhibition – back to shoes, socks and the world’s other problems.