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

On the pitch of Austria's Klagenfurt’s Wörthersee Stadium, where footballers would normally chase a ball beneath floodlights, 299 mature trees once stood in near silence. In 2019, Swiss artist and curator Klaus Littmann transformed the Austrian arena into a temporary forest, replacing the familiar spectacle of sport with a landscape of birch, oak, hornbeam, willow and other Central European trees. The trees, some reaching about 14 metres and weighing up to six tonnes, filled roughly 7,200 square metres of the stadium pitch. Visitors did not walk among them. They sat in the stands and watched the forest below as though it were the event. The installation, titled FOR FOREST – The Unending Attraction of Nature, was conceived as an unsettling question about what happens when something as ordinary as a forest becomes rare enough to require a special place to see one.A football stadium became a place to watch treesThe transformation was powerful because almost nothing about the stadium changed except what occupied the pitch. The seats remained. The grandstands remained. The architecture remained recognisably that of a football arena. What disappeared was the game. Instead, spectators loo...