Dansemyg Dance Floor

The Southern Forest

Hartmut Stockter’s works always focus on the landscape and the animals and plants that inhabit it. They often take the form of handmade tools, such as his underground periscope, butterfly scale, and earthworm ambulance. With the work “Dance Mosquito Dance Floor,” Hartmut Stockter has transformed part of a small conifer plantation into a dance floor in honor of small, non-biting mosquito species, the so-called “dance mosquitoes” (Chironomidae). Here, “the devoted lover of mosquito dance,” as Stockter puts it, performs dances while wearing a special mosquito mask or helmet. The space is adorned with enlarged models of mosquitoes, which hang at heights of up to several meters above a small artificial waterhole. Underlying the concept of the dance floor is, not least, the realization that there are already more than enough monuments dedicated to large and magnificent animals.