YAHOOS-GARDEN, founded in 2008 together with Franz Rauchenberger, is a biennial project that uses water as a medium for temporary artistic interventions in public spaces. The ambiguous choice of name for the project is to be understood as programmatic: Yahoos, as described in Jonathan Swift's fantastical satirical travel novel ‘Gulliver's Travels,’ are humanoid, wild hybrid creatures with impulsive and uncontrollable behaviour who serve as servants to superhuman horses. The name of the internet portal Yahoo! – which has since become an independent search engine – is derived from Swift's novel, but is understood both as an acronym and in its direct meaning of ‘unadulterated’. A mere name provides an opportunity to explore a wide range of meanings: originality and service as hubs for reflecting on our perceptual sensibilities in everyday life.
ART and RAIN
Thought structures in liquid media are part of the concept of the Water Biennale YAHOOS-GARDEN. In a wet world, complementary structures emerge that come closer to our areas of life - creating chains of association that increasingly detach themselves from the aesthetics of objects in order to connect with our seemingly uncontrollable world, like RAIN, in a ‘hydraulic landscape’. Wherever others try to manipulate the RAIN falling from the SKY or seek stability in weather reports, RAIN water nevertheless defines our human limits between the possibility of drowning or dying of thirst within planetary physics.
Günther Pedrotti, initiator and artistic director