On Saturday 1st February 2025 I was able to visit long term colleague and friend Steven Wright at his new curatorial home at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. Wright, and his partner Tamarind Rossetti, took over as Artistic Directors of Stuttgart Künstlerhaus the previous year (January 2024). Founded in 1978 Stuttgart Künstlerhaus has a novel approach to artistic directorship – engaging each director (or directorial team) for a fixed three-to-four-year period as a means to ensure that cutting edge practice and discourse, coupled with experimental approaches to both exhibition making and the distribution and reception of contemporary art.  

Previously, In 2018, Rossetti and Wright founded a 1:1 scale agroecological test site called Ferie au Sauvage for growing organic fruits and vegetables, where they offered farm-to-table meals and farm-to-panel workshops (called “ideaseeding”), ran a farm store in the studio, and documented the project through art. Currently they are operating a permaculture farm and research project in Corrèze, France. Seeing their new role at Stuttgart Künstlerhaus as “an opportunity to implement ideas gleaned over the years from usology and permaculture, from art education, publishing and exhibition making, in an ‘extradisciplinary’ environment”, my visit coincided with the installation of Riverpmap, a series of online/offline interventions into the space of the Künstlerhaus in which Brian Holmes has mapped the social, economic, political and environmental river flows of the the American Midwest, the Pacific Northwest coast and the La Plata Basin in South America. As the Künstlerhaus webste attests “Holmes was previously known in European art and activist circles as an essayist and public speaker, and over the course of these years he has invented a new but strangely familiar genre, the essay map, filled with written text, scientific visualization and multimedia image.” Künstlerhaus Stuttgart opens “Brian Holmes: Rivermap”