This year's guest artist, Daniela Brasil, has been living in Graz since 2010 and deals poetically with processes of transfer and migration. She repeatedly returns to her family's landscapes of memory in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She uses her personal geographies to reveal colonial entanglements, experiences of uprooting, and possibilities of re-rooting. Her artistic research explores connections: between past and present, between bodies and territories, between stories that are told and those that have yet to be rediscovered.
Starting in April, she will build a sensual, political, and communal art-nature-life laboratory under a willow dome of Magnolia, focusing on the colonial journey of the Passiflora—the maracujá—from South America to Austria, where it is now winter-hardy and naturalized.
Revisiting records of Austrian expeditions to Brazil in the early nineteenth century, Daniela Brasil turns to the watercolors of Thomas Ender and Michael Sandler, which document the colonial scientific expeditions in Rio de Janeiro. Ender’s works offer magnificent narrations of the tropical landscape, while Sandler’s botanical drawings depict plants as open bodies, dissected to reveal their internal structures with anatomical precision. From this material, she selects the passionflower as the leitmotif of her work, among the thousands of plants and seeds brought to Vienna—some of which may also have ended up in the scientific collections of the Universalmuseum Joanneum in Graz.
How can we trace the journeys of these plants—feel their impact beyond collecting, stealing, drying, packaging, storing, and domesticating? Passiflora embodies more than botanical curiosity: its sensual forms, bright colors, and enticing scents reflect the desire for possession that inspired empires. At the same time, it resists confinement and unfurls tendrils for subtle seduction and mutual transformation. Torn from tropical soils and transplanted into the European climate, tropical migrants such as Passiflora had to re-root themselves, adapt to frost and unfamiliar soils, and rewrite the narratives imposed on them.
Up/Rooting reflects on this in the form of a healing garden, where visitors are invited to linger among migrant plants, feel their power, and learn from their adaptations. This garden is both meditation and artistic gesture—a regenerative space where sensual curiosity and the intertwined histories of Brazil and Austria converge.
Passiflora not only stands for the fruity sweetness of maracujá, but also has a calming effect as a medicinal plant.
With the motto 'What's growing in the sculpture park — and where does it come from?', we will be discovering even more well-travelled plants in the sculpture park in 2026.
