When the Morsbroich Workshop was founded in 2022 to rethink the museum and redesign the Morsbroich ensemble, it was necessary to clarify how each member would approach their area of responsibility and how the workshop as a collective would tackle the challenge. Collaborations quickly formed within the workshop. It was clear that in this structure of individuals and fields of activity, tasks could not be solved alone, but rather through dialogue.

Gabriela Oberkofler captured the dynamics of the early phase of the workshop process with her moss work. She invited the artists of the workshop to bring moss from their hometowns or elsewhere. Gabriela placed two or three different types of moss in a jar, which has remained sealed ever since (!). Each jar functions as a self-contained ecosystem in which the moss absorbs water in a cycle, extracts nutrients from it, and releases the liquid again. The mosses grow in the jars, they mate and crossbreed. As in an experiment, new, previously unknown species emerge.

The growth of moss can thus be seen as a symbol of the work of the artist collective, a work of constant transformation, cooperation, and renewal. Gabriela compares the way moss communicates directly with its environment, absorbing and releasing water, to the work of a museum: “What moss does with water, the museum does with social issues. It absorbs them and releases them in transformed form in the form of exhibitions.”

For the presentation of the moss glasses in the former ladies' salon and garden room of Morsbroich Castle, Gabriela, in cooperation with Harald F. Müller (Werkstatt Morsbroich), has planned a colorful frame with a slightly shimmering shade of pink (“Chanel”) developed by him and coordinated with the Rococo decoration. 

On the occasion of the Morsbroich Art Days in May 2023, an invitation was issued for the “Morsbroich Banquet” on Saturday evening. A “celebratory evening” would be celebrated at a floating table. “Eating, drinking, listening, and talking” were to become a “sensory total experience under the conditions of art.” For one weekend at least, art would take over the restaurant rooms and the garden hall in the northern coach houses, the former barns of Morsbroich Castle, which had been empty for some time, and turn them into stages. They were used by the members of the Morsbroich Workshop as hosts and, last but not least, by the guests themselves.

The preparation and presentation of the banquet in four courses tailored to the offerings of the Morsbroich orchard were directed by Antje Schiffers. For Sunday, the volunteers from the museum shop arranged a “floating cake buffet” with a large selection of homemade baked goods. The special artistic staging of the banquet hall was entirely in the hands of Gabriela Oberkofler, whose installation ensured an unforgettable experience.

A floating table suspended from the ceiling, composed of a wealth of enticing individual pieces: the image Gabriela created is vaguely reminiscent of the lavishly laid tables of the courtly Baroque era with their rich decorations. However, she immediately dispels this impression by transforming the table into a state of mobility and fragility. There is no longer a fixed, hierarchically ordered seating arrangement. Instead, the table is accessible to everyone and from all sides—just as the castle has opened itself up as a museum for society, which now gathers here as a table society and allows the table around which people move to become a place of encounter.

She hung hundreds of red strings from the ceiling and designed the garden hall like a spatial drawing, with densely placed vertical hatching in the center of the room and largely abstract painting on the back walls, which could be read as a landscape with its green and pink tones, a counterpart to the window views of the castle garden opposite. What came together at table height to form a multi-part, visually overwhelming yet fragile table that swayed delicately when handled were all small wonders of nature: moss-covered branches, (serving) boards made of old wood, leaf tendrils, flowers, ears of corn, and fruits. However, the fact that this brilliant image of nature, in all its lightness and opulence, literally hung by a thread also made it a metaphor for vulnerability. As the food was served course by course, it gave the impression that nature itself was offering the feast—a gift that one was invited to accept with a different awareness. 

Eingefleischte Wege, 2023–2025