Reaktor Potenziale #7

It is with great joy to announce the winning project of this year’s open call:

Serving Garden | by Asphalt Kollektiv

“The garden always emerges from a combined act of humans and nature,… their art unfolds in the treatment of boundaries.”
— Gilles Clément, Gardens, Landscape and the Genius of Nature Serving

Garden invites connection — not separation. At the threshold between REAKTOR’s garden and the adjacent construction site, a mirrored table becomes a site of encounter and negotiation, forming a bridge for dialogue. Made of polished mirror-finish steel, it reflects the sky, the surroundings, and the viewers themselves — inviting presence, conversation, and shared reflection. This table acts as a performative threshold: when unfolded toward the wasteland, it symbolically extends beyond the fence, merging two distinct zones. It becomes a silent invitation — to cross, to meet, to imagine together. If the invitation is de-clined, the flexible half remains upright, transforming into a vertical mirror — an image of reflection and expanded space. In this way, the work oscillates between gesture and image, between presence and absence. Once a Heuriger under the name Etablissement Gschwandner, REAKTOR has long served as a space of gathering, celebration, and shared experience. Today, it con-tinues this legacy through experimentation and dialogue. Serving Garden proposes to extend this spirit — beyond the cultivated garden, across the fence, into the adjacent terrain of possibility. The wasteland is not emptiness, but a latent field for new forms of community and connection. The fence, rather than a barrier, becomes a hinge — a point of fluid integration between the cultivated and the wild, between what is and what could be. Serving Garden reflects the tensions of our present moment — marked by fragmentation — and offers, in response, a quiet image of togetherness. A sensual and conceptual intervention, the work invites through different events both visitors and neighbors to gather, reflect, and co-shape a shared future. An inauguration event marks the table’s first inviting gesture — not merely as a performative act, but as a collective celebration of an open space.