In 2019, Klaus Littmann filled an Austrian stadium with 299 trees to show a future without forests

For several weeks in 2019, spectators at Austria's Wörthersee Stadium watched a forest instead of a football match. Swiss artist and curator Klaus Littmann placed 299 mature trees on the pitch, creating a quiet and unsettling spectacle beneath the stadium lights.

The trees included birch, oak, hornbeam, willow and other Central European species. Some stood about 14 metres tall and weighed up to six tonnes. Together, they covered roughly 7,200 square metres of the pitch. The stands and the stadium's architecture remained unchanged, but the game disappeared.

Visitors could see the forest free of charge from Sept. 8 to Oct. 27, 2019. They did not walk among the trees. Instead, they sat in the stands and viewed the woodland below, as if nature itself had become the event. Littmann said the arrangement was meant to show how people take familiar things for granted. “By removing something from the familiar into a new context, you raise new questions,” he said.

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It's primarily about how we take things for granted.

The installation, titled “FOR FOREST, The Unending Attraction of Nature,” drew on Austrian artist Max Peintner's drawing “The Unending Attraction of Nature,” created in 1970 and 1971. Peintner imagined a stadium filled with trees while an urbanized and industrialized world surrounded it. Littmann encountered the drawing decades later and sought to recreate its unsettling image in physical form.

Swiss landscape architect Enzo Enea oversaw the selection and transplantation of mature trees. Littmann wanted the stadium to contain something that looked like a real mixed woodland, not a collection of ornamental plants. The result turned a familiar sports arena into a place where visitors watched living nature as though it were already disappearing.

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By removing something from the familiar into a new context, you raise new questions.