#gardenasutopia

[florencefreitag]

Botanical Garden Anthology

Thank you to everyone who came to our Botanical Garden Anthology in the Kulturgarden at Hellerau the other day. It really was a pleasure. I...

we went to the Kulturgarten in Hellerau, listened to the apple trees and invited people to root down with us

[florencefreitag]

Rosalind Masson (GB/DE) & Florence Freitag (DE) TANZPAKT Dresden 2020 - HELLERAU

Garten als widersprüchlicher utopischer Raum TANZPAKT Dresden Dresden ...

we had a visitor with us in the Botanic Garden for our last day of research

[florencefreitag]

Garden Project Week 8: Apple

Cotton dyed with apple bark/leaves, onion and cherry, paper White varnish, charcoal, Silver Birch on paper Charcoal rubbing, Popl...

we thought we’d go from the garden to a studio and ended up realizing that the garden was/is/will be the studio

[florencefreitag]

rooting for future storytelling

[florencefreitag]

why is it that when i see fern, i feel immediately connected to home? is there more to it then fern being the vascular plant growing behind my childhood kitchen? the way to the garden always lead through them. i connect fern with deep green moist and rain and a warm feeling of this thing called home. so what is that, rosie? today, in the lecture series we’ve been watching, Emanuele Coccia ended saying that no one should “stay at home any longer”. besides him connecting this to the current pandemic situation, i also noticed it for another reason. concerning forests, Coccia describes them as the human made home for all “natural ‘things’”, for the “excluded”. to step out of these dichotomies and understanding the terrestrial plane we need to all loose our homes, that’s what he said, in more drastic words. isn’t this a position that only a privileged hu/man can take? loosing home? i understand the idea that everything and every place has become home right now and that for reconstructing connections, we need to first deconstruct those and loose an illusion of what we thought we had, but isn’t exactly the notion of home something connected to more then the physical space of walls and places? did i misunderstood Coccia? the notion of home also makes me think about our observations yesterday at the botanical garden in Dresden and those fossilized trees: 33 millions years (YES) old, unimaginable, or better untraceable with any body feeling. they were fossilized sequoia trees. my parents have one of that family in their garden, they planted the tree when i came there, more then 30 years ago. that sequoia still has their roots, to the contrary to the fossil tree and they are taller than our house. now my parents would like to take that cousin down. their roots are destroying the foundation of our home. shouldn’t these foundations be the home? shouldn’t we stay connected to them? must we be afraid of so much force that this sequoia has? lifting up the concrete ground of our house and home. maybe these concrete stones need to be lifted up and this is what Coccia meant… ?!

[florencefreitag]

there is a sun side and a shadow side. the shadow side is the one with the braidings, the wooden ribcages. those contain the stories, woven stories into her barked, slightly curved back. everything she saw in the past years/decades. her wide open shadow sided womb attracted me. i wanted to crawl into her and tell her all my secrets, sing a song for her. these weavings are like the work she does for us, healing, composting, transforming. a place of careful intensity. 

so i turned around her, towards the sun side. turned to the river, catching its flow. this is where the energy enters the warmed bark and roots. i stood there, leaning onto her soft roundness. did she feel my song? it came up while watching her. maybe the story i told her through the sun side of her trunk will now be transformed into another weaving, a witness of time passing, a keeper of secrets and circular knowledges. 

i realized that i don't know anymore how to give you touch. what happens if some part of your bark breaks down? is it like me loosing a single hair? do your mycelia touch the Neisse? so many questions...

[florencefreitag]

dye with onion skin. the process of dying has made us stay outside all day. it takes time, it is rooting down, it makes one understand. i chose the onion while rosie chose the apple tree with its bark and leaves.

i cannot help myself but think of the other process of dying when hearing this word. the one connected to the end of life, the process of passing from one state of being into another one. at the same time dying is a process imprinting. i was interested in finding another texture in between us and the plant, another layer of information, another part of the story, a story that’s a process in itself.

[florencefreitag]

if i separate

dear rosie, before leaving and while reading your last mail, i had many visual and audio desires ...

you asked 3 questions: 1. Are we able to let the plants take care of us? What would that look like ?  2. How much time to we wanna spend with plants 3. How much time do we wanna spend breathing? 

i answer:

1.  “your hands have the texture of we grass tonight. Let me hold them for a while longer” 2. There should be not separation 3. If I separate it it means that I am not there anymore 

what do you say?