In 2019, artist Klaus Littmann filled an Austrian football stadium with 299 trees, turning it into a forest to show a future without forests | World News

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 trees

The 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 looked across the field at a dense arrangement of living trees, a scene that felt simultaneously familiar and profoundly out of place. The installation was open to the public free of charge from 8 September until 27 October 2019, and visitors viewed the forest from the stands from morning until late evening. The restriction was deliberate. Littmann wanted the audience to experience the forest as something observed rather than entered. “It’s primarily about how we take things for granted,” he said. “By removing something from the familiar into a new context, you raise new questions.”

The original idea was drawn almost 50 years earlier

Littmann did not invent the strange image of people sitting in a stadium to watch a forest. The idea came from Austrian artist Max Peintner’s drawing The Unending Attraction of Nature, created in 1970 and 1971. Peintner’s work depicted a stadium containing trees while the outside world appeared heavily urbanised and industrialised. The people in the stands were not watching a football match but observing the remaining traces of nature below, as though a forest had become a spectacle. Littmann encountered the drawing decades later and became determined to recreate it in physical form. He eventually found the opportunity to turn Peintner’s unsettling vision into a real landscape in Klagenfurt.

The forest was meant to feel real, not decorative

There was a practical challenge behind the visual shock. Littmann wanted the stadium to contain what looked like an actual mixed woodland rather than a giant collection of ornamental plants. Swiss landscape architect Enzo Enea oversaw the selection and transplantation of mature trees, creating a composition intended to resemble a Central European forest. The species included silver birch, alder, aspen, white willow, hornbeam, field maple and oak. Because the trees were already mature, their scale changed the stadium dramatically. From the upper tiers, the pitch no longer resembled a landscaped sports ground with a few trees added to it. It looked as though a woodland had somehow taken possession of the entire playing field.

The unsettling part was that nobody could enter it

A conventional public forest invites people to walk beneath the canopy, touch the bark and follow paths between the trees. FOR FOREST denied that experience. Visitors remained spectators. From the stands, they could see the crowns moving in the wind and the forest changing with the season, but the pitch was not theirs to explore. The restriction reinforced Peintner’s original idea that nature might eventually be something people simply go somewhere to look at. Littmann was explicit that the project was not intended as entertainment in the ordinary sense. “It’s not about playing around in the forest,” he said. Instead, the unusual setting was meant to make people reconsider something they normally encounter without thinking about it.

It was a warning about a world where forests become exhibits

The installation’s environmental message was deliberately indirect. It did not depict dying trees, burning landscapes or a devastated ecosystem. It showed a healthy forest, but in the wrong place. That reversal was the warning. Littmann’s project description says the work sought to challenge perceptions of nature and question its future, while reminding people that nature, which is often taken for granted, might someday survive only in specially designated spaces. Austrian broadcaster ORF similarly described the project as a warning connected to climate change. The stadium was not supposed to represent an actual future location for forests. It was a visual metaphor for the possibility that intact nature could become so diminished that people would experience it as an attraction.

The reaction was as much about the idea as the trees

The installation quickly became a global talking point because its image was almost impossible to forget. A football stadium is built around crowds, noise and competition, yet FOR FOREST made stillness the spectacle. Austrian public broadcaster ORF reported that around 100 journalists from around the world attended the press presentation, while the completed installation drew nearly 200,000 visitors during its two-month run. More than 8,000 people came on the final day. The project also generated controversy in Klagenfurt, including criticism over the football club having to play some matches elsewhere and questions about transporting trees from nurseries outside Austria. Those objections became part of the story because they exposed the tension between an environmental message and the practical footprint of creating a large temporary artwork.

The trees themselves had a future after the stadium

The forest was always temporary, but the trees were not intended to be disposable props. After the exhibition closed on 27 October, all 299 trees were removed from the stadium and moved to Lower Austria. Contemporary ORF reporting said they would be replanted there and form the basis of a future FOR FOREST Campus. The move also highlighted an important distinction between the artwork and the living material used to create it. The stadium forest lasted only weeks as an installation, but the trees were being treated as living organisms with a future beyond the exhibition.

Nearly five decades later, Peintner’s warning had become a real place

What made FOR FOREST so striking was the gap between the original drawing and its eventual realisation. A disturbing image made in 1970 and 1971 had spent decades as an idea before Littmann recreated it at enormous scale in an Austrian football stadium. Peintner had imagined spectators looking at trees where a team should have been. Littmann made that scene physically possible, filling a real stadium with a forest and asking a modern audience to look at it from the stands. In a media reel for the project, Peintner described the original scene as people observing a forest instead of watching a team, with almost nothing moving except the leaves in the wind.The image ultimately worked because it did not tell visitors what a future without forests would look like. It showed them something more subtle and unsettling. A forest had survived, but had become an object of spectatorship. Nature had not vanished from the stadium. It had vanished from where people expected it to be. By placing 299 living trees on a football pitch, Littmann turned an ordinary sporting venue into a thought experiment about scarcity, memory and the value of landscapes that people often assume will always exist. For two months in 2019, one of Austria’s most recognisable public spaces became a place where the main attraction was not a match, a concert or a celebrity, but the simple presence of trees.