Berlin, February 2009: A red Volvo is parked behind the building, the hood void of its motor. The engine sits idling inside a large white room, engulfing a nearby, eight foot-high green cactus with gentle heat… What sounds like the beginning of a bizarre dream is a scene from the show Under Lime by the British artist Simon Starling in Berlin, which recently opened at the Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlin. Starling is a conceptual artist who has become increasingly known for illuminating the relationship between (art) production and the environment and between creation, energy and waste in a global context.

Take the cactus in the exhibition hall: It is not your off-the-rack type, but one of the species which Sergio Leone’s film team brought to Spain’s Taberna desert to film their famous Spaghetti Westerns in the 1960s. “It is the only true desert in Europe and it was cheaper to produce the movie there than in the real Wild West,” Starling explains. He transported the cactus first to Frankfurt and now to Berlin using the same red Volvo parked outside the exhibition and used the guts of the car to provide the desert plant with its natural climate. (more…)