The seven-meter-high palm-tree shaped sculpture of bricks, steel tubes, metal and mosaic stones addresses the subject of global warming and the changes it brings to people’s quality of life in increasingly hotter and increasingly more sealed urban environments. On several levels of reading, the sculpture stands for the consequential climatic shift of vegetation in Central Europe and makes an urgent appeal to change course in our daily lives. Against the background of the Catholic parish church in central Floridsdorf, the palm tree is at once a symbol of the paradisiacal idea of fertility in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic culture and of the clichéd exoticism of colonial thinking and globalization.

“In late February 2022, an incredibly brutal invasion by the Russian government was started in Europe—there is no language that can account for this madness. Our reality has starkly changed, and our artistic thought and action are being called into question. The palm-tree sculpture also becomes an exhausted tree of peace, manifesting a moment of immediate exigency to engage for and value every single life on our Earth. Now!” (Veronika Dirnhofer and Anna Khodorkovskaya)