Drawing on Prince Wilhelm von Nassau’s notion of paradise, Zum Paradies. Akt II understands paradise not as a physical place, but as a projection surface for human longing for retreat, control, and beauty in an overstimulated present. The garden becomes a conceptual space in which utopia and escapism, nature and construction intersect and overlap. Never historically innocent, it emerges both as a site of protection and a political terrain. An arena of care and exclusion, and of new ecological entanglements in the age of the Anthropocene.

Today’s paradise appears increasingly synthetic, shaped by digitality, self-optimization, and chemical substitute worlds. The exhibition reads this condition as a symptom of our time and transforms the garden of Villa Schöningen into a landscape suspended between ecstasy and exhaustion, beauty and decay.