Mats Werchohlad: Mediating Atmospheres. A Walk through the Park on the Ilm
Wednesday | June 18, 2025 | 2:00-4:30
Goethe and Schiller Archive, Jenaer Straße 1, 99423 Weimar
Abstract:
Our walk leads through a heterotopic terrain where practices of thinking, sensing and shaping nature converge. Emerging from Anna Amalia’s cultural politics, the Ilmpark stands as an expression of the nature ideals of classical Weimar, for which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe holds a particular significance. In his engagement with the garden and in his literary, artistic, and scientific pursuits, he saw his life and work as part of nature’s unfolding metamorphosis. Lesser-known topographies unfold in the Bauhaus’s relation to the park. Through gardening, spiritual exercises, and spatial uses, nature visions were experienced and reshaped in and through the landscape. Gernot Böhme’s philosophy of atmosphere offers a connecting thread for these situated conceptions. The landscape garden becomes paradigmatic: nature is not merely observed but mediated and constructed through experience. Walking thus becomes a mode of reflecting and engaging with nature as an evolving landscape of thought.