Rut Blees Luxemburg, The Lesson of the Vine

Rut Blees Luxemburg is a reader in Urban Aesthetics at the Royal College of Art. Her work as an artist and photographer concerns the representation of the city and the phenomenon of the urban, combining several formats, ranging from large-scale photographic works, through public art installations and operatic mise-en-scène.

Rut Blees Luxemburg will introduce her public art work ‘The Lesson of the Vine’ for the new community hall in Leiwen an der Mosel. Leiwen, a village on the German side of the Moselle is highly esteemed for its Riesling vines and has a long tradition of wine making. The lesson of the vine is a celebration of this knowledge and aims to bring to the fore the pedagogical potential of nature by proposing the concept of Erziehung or ‘cultivation’ of the vine as a reciprocal relationship.

The vines teach the local and growing new community important life-skills that foreground care, discipline and continuity. The art work exists on the external façade as a concrete manifestation, but also as an edition of texts, poems and observations on the lesson of the vine by philosophers, architects and winegrowers. Rut Blees Luxemburg will explore how a local artwork can resonate in a wider context through interdisciplinary collaboration.