THE TEA CHARIOT
Thursday, July 23, 2026 – Dominican Church – 7:00 p.m.
THE TEA CHARIOT
INSTALLATION BY RAFRAM CHADDAD, AMELIE SEEGER, SEBASTIAN GIUSSANI
In the former Dominican church of St. Magdalena, in the historic heart of Augsburg, a walk-in art installation on the leitmotif of “Waterways – Canals, Sea Routes, Empire” is being created during the Water & Sound Festival.
At the center is a living tea plant in a glass box, a Wardian Case, surrounded by sound, cartography, light and space.
“The Tea Chariot” is a process-oriented collaboration between the artist Rafram Chaddad, who works in Tunis and Turin, the Augsburg artist Sebastian Giussani, the stage and costume designer Amelie Seeger and Girisha Fernando, who is providing conceptual support for the project. Together, they have created a sculptural and sound-artistic work in which tea appears as a botanical protagonist of globalization: as a plant that has crossed oceans and canals through trade, espionage, theft, colonialism and ritual. At the interface of sculpture, sound installation, light and floor mapping, a dense network of image, space and sound is created.
The installation makes visible and tangible how globalization, botanical espionage and waterways are intertwined.
Wardian case, tea theft and Dominican church
The starting point of the installation is a tea plant in a terrarium, inspired by the historic Wardian Case. This closed glass case system revolutionized the worldwide transport of living plants from 1829, as it significantly increased their chances of survival on long voyages. In the mid-19th century, the Scottish botanist Robert Fortune used this technology for an illegal operation on behalf of the British East India Company:
He smuggled thousands of tea plants and seeds from China to India, circumventing Chinese export bans.
This operation was intended to reduce Britain’s massive trade deficit with China, which had been caused primarily by tea imports and had already contributed to the Opium Wars. Based on this plant transfer, the tea plantations in Assam and Darjeeling were established, gradually replacing China as the leading tea export region. Tea thus became a key product of global interdependence, with profound consequences for waterways, trade routes, labor regimes, landscapes and everyday rituals. In St. Magdalena, the terrarium is positioned as the central body of the installation like a relic. It is surrounded by a large-scale floor work that visualizes imperial trade routes as cartographies of global extraction, as well as an immersive sound installation. The history of the church as a place of religious authority and patrician representation is thus subtly questioned and reinterpreted through plant life, sound and cartography.
Opening hours:
Fri. 24.7. – So. 26.7. and Wed. 29.7. – Sat. 1.8.,
13:00 – 18:00 each day
Supported by “BBK – Verbindungslinien” with funds from the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts.
Contributors:
Rafram Chaddad
Rafram Chaddad, born on the Tunisian island of Djerba, is an artist who works on personal memories and socio-political issues such as migration, displacement, identity and belonging. He has realized numerous short films and installations that have been shown internationally in cultural institutions, galleries and museums, including Kunst im Tunnel Düsseldorf, Kunstraum New York, Kayu Lucie Fontaine Gallery in Bali and Milan, ArteEast Foundation New York and Halle 14 Leipzig. Since 2021, Chaddad has been a visiting critic at Columbia University’s MFA program.
Sebastian Giussani
Sebastian Giussani is an award-winning visual artist and musician who lives and works in Augsburg. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and has been working as a freelance artist for many years. His work includes sound and sound installations, art in architecture, expansive installations as well as musical and performative projects.
Amelie Seeger
Amelie Seeger has been working as a stage and costume designer since 2018. She studied stage and costume design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Her own work and artistic collaborations have taken her to the Staatstheater Augsburg, the independent theater ensemble e.V., HochX Munich, the Bayerische Theaterakademie August Everding, the Residenztheater Munich and the Thalia Theater Hamburg, among others. Her work moves between research and personal sensory perception: she sees staged spaces as places of sensory experience in which the audience can relate to a theme in terms of content, sensory and emotional experience.
Illustration above: Amelie Seeger
Photos below from left to right: Molka Kortebi, Sebastian Giussani, Elisabeth Nittka