Asef-Burckhardt, “MOTHER-BURN,” 2025

MOTHER-BURN (2025) is the title of the second video in a trilogy by the artist duo Mario Asef and Kirstin Burckhardt. Together with the first video, SHELTER-BONE (2024) – previously shown at Kunstverein Göttingen – and accompanied by a material archive, photographs, drawings, collages, paintings, a sound sculpture, and a performance, the work was recently presented at MOS (Miejski Ośrodek Sztuki) Art Center in Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland. Over the coming years, the exhibition will evolve and travel to various cities across Europe. Curated at MOS by Bartosz Nowak with precise sensitivity to the resonance relations between media surfaces and spatial structures, the second iteration of the project unfolded as a multidimensional montage spread across the exhibition spaces with the two aforementioned performance-films forming a conceptual and structural frame: The pivotal point of the show consisted in charred Redwood tree remnants on the site of the Sea Ranch, located north of San Francisco – remnants of “natural” vegetation burns and wildfires.

The Sea Ranch, an eco-community project initiated by Al Boeke in the early 1960s, was designed as a planned settlement by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin in collaboration with the architects Joseph Esherick, Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, Richard Whitaker, and William Turnbull. Beyond its iconic wooden houses, the site gained cultural prominence for workshops held there by dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin, among others. These events brought together performers, dancers, and visual artists and became a crucial arena for the US avant-garde in the 1960s and ’70s. Driven by the idea of “collective creativity,” Halprin’s workshops anticipated the concepts of cultural, ethnic, gender, sexual, generational, and class-related “diversity,” which since the 1990s have become increasingly established (and are now, as we know, suppressed by Trump). [1]

Asef-Burckhardt, “Personal Archive,” since 2023

One archival photograph reproduced by Asef and Burckhardt shows Anna Halprin with another person holding a long sheet of paper describing an “entry score,” instructing participants to walk slowly, look, listen, breathe, smell, and touch. This behavioral index, reminiscent of mindfulness practices, reappears in Asef and Burckhardt’s Personal Archive (2023–25), a large, wall-mounted leporello that documents the RSVP cycles, a methodological system the Halprins developed to foster creative, collaborative work across dance, performance, and architecture to all areas of life: R stood for resources (i.e., generating and gathering intuitions, ideas, and physical materials), S for score (i.e., notating open and closed systems), V for valuaction (i.e., value-based responses), and P for performance (i.e., translating scores into embodied action). Handwritten annotations by Asef and Burckhardt in the Personal Archive discuss the cybernetically conceived RSVP cycles in relation to the utopia of a harmony between life, nature, art, and architecture. They refer, for example, to the vision of countering the barrenness of predominantly white middle-class suburbia with an integrative model of the social – avoiding white dominance had been a theme of the Sea Ranch from the very beginning. However, archival materials reproduced in the exhibition show that by the 1980s this vision had already faded as the increasingly expensive real estate was predominantly accessible to well-off white homeowners who preferred space- and resource-intensive single-family houses. By linking the social and ecological effects of neoliberal capitalism – which are evident today in, for example, the short-term Airbnb rentals of Sea Ranch homes – with tangible traces of climate change, Asef and Burckhardt’s research combines a documentary-archival and performative-dramaturgical approach, situated in the present, to explore the relevance and transformative potential of artistic practices – a question connecting to Halprin’s performance concept, notably presented at “documenta 14” (2017), of a socio-ecological practice of art and life.

Asef-Burckhardt, “Personal Archive,” since 2023

Their mimetic-critical engagement with the Halprin legacy unfolded in the “MOTHER-BURN” exhibition, named after the video, through a variety of distinct media and material installation elements: For example, Asef and Burckhardt applied the RSVP principles to the famous cypress hedgerows originally planted at Sea Ranch as wind and surf barriers. By overlapping photographic reproductions of these hedgerows, now transformed by time and climate, with architectural plans, they reimagined them as potential living spaces and as revisions of ecological building practices (Hedgerow House, 2024). Also, Burckhardt’s highly reduced, almost slow-motion dance performance, which was filmed by Asef and which forms the core of the video, deliberately resists a literal implementation of the RSVP scores. Instead, it responds spontaneously and situationally to the wind- and wave-driven movements and sounds of the local grasses, shrubs, and trees along the coastline, juxtaposing cybernetic systems thinking with the decolonial reversal of subject-object relations drawn from critical ethnology. Turning redwood trees into formative agents, the interaction between choreo- and videography becomes a techno-organic collaboration between vegetation, body, and camera. As if echoing land art’s typical interconnections between nature, culture, and industrial history, the natural landscape appeared as a (media-)aesthetic infrastructure, and thus also as a component of colonial history. Likewise, Asef and Burckhardt’s Personal Archive, reminiscent of quasi-cinematic montages, also contained conversation notes about pampas grass, considered “invasive,” which was imported from South America, and which thrives along the coastal strip bordering the Sea Ranch. These and other historically loaded references suggested associations with racist immigration policies, also of the current US government.

Asef-Burckhardt, “Oil and Discarded Matter on Canvas,” 2025

By using charred redwood tree remnants and dried pampas grass, both as found materials and as drawing tools – for instance, in the large-scale landscape paintings reminiscent of classical tapestries (Oil and Discarded Matter on Canvas, 2025) – Asef and Burckhardt invert the RSVP concept of recycling into a formal-aesthetic reversal of medium and message. These works, alongside collages of close-up photographs of local flora and diagrammatic drawings combining geological illustrations with organic patterns, render Anna and Lawrence Halprin’s “Experiments in Re-Encoding Environment” [2] not as a finished historical project but as an open-ended material speculation on the coastal landscape: as if the waves, rocks, shrubs, trunks, branches, and leaves have always contained the conditions for their perceptual-aesthetic reproduction. In this spirit, Asef and Burckhardt’s works collapse (re)production and reception into one. Their tent-like sculpture In Between Before and After (2024) was equipped with transducers that transferred a conversation onto thick paper: the voices made the charred redwood pieces on the paper vibrate, creating traces of dust and lines and, in the process, wear themselves away. Transformed into a medium for (self-)articulation around the question of how to engage care-fully with redwood charcoal beyond ecological dystopias, this work and the exhibition as a whole consistently reversed the perspective between medium and subject: landscape was not something to be looked at but from – and was something which also looked back.

Asef-Burckhardt, “In Between Before and After,” 2024

Seen within the broader context of artistic revisions of land art and community-based projects, Asef and Burckhardt’s work invites comparison with that of artists like Julie Ault, Martin Beck, Renée Green, and Nils Norman, among others. Yet what stands out is how their research-, context-, and site-specific approach is grounded in the idea of a performative agency of the materials they present. The RSVP cycles function here as an auto-environmental code, equally applicable to art historical landscape genres, as these also provided prototypes for hierarchical representations for natural via artistic beauty. In this light, “MOTHER-BURN” sparks precisely where objects are stripped of their own means.

“Asef–Burckhardt: MOTHER-BURN,” MOS Art Center, Gorzów Wielkopolski, June 6–July 6, 2025.

Translation: Erik Smith

Sabeth Buchmann is an art historian and art critic based in Berlin and Vienna. She is a professor of modern and postmodern art at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Buchmann is the coeditor of PoLyPen, a series on art criticism and political theory (b_books, Berlin), and a board member of Texte zur Kunst, the European Kunsthalle, and the Documenta Institute. Her recent publications include Kunst als Infrastruktur (2022), Broken Relations: Infrastructure, Aesthetic, and Critique (2022, coeditor), and Putting Rehearsals to the Test: Practices of Rehearsal in Fine Arts, Film, Theater, Theory, and Politics (2016, coeditor).

Image credits: 1 + 2 + 5 © Asef-Burckhardt; 3 + 4 © Monika Szalczyńska; all images courtesy Miejski Ośrodek Sztuki