Being as a Tree

The installation Iep, Els, Es, Kers (seams) contains silicone negatives taken from grafted trees in the Netherlands, where in the cities one can find fully grown trees that are composed of two different kind of trees montaged on top of each other. Each silicone negative horizontally reproduces the seam where two different trees have grown together.

In the sculpture Iep, Els, Es, Kers (sign), one of the grafted trees from the neighbouring installation Iep, Els, Es, Kers (seams) is shown as an illuminated photograph, recalling a bar or a shop sign with no clearly defined message of what to expect.

In the focus of the work lies the only specimen of the cycad Encephalartos woodii that still exists and which is located at the Kew Gardens in London. J. M. Wood “discovered” the plant 1895 in the area of todays South Africa where he removed a part of the main stem and sent it to the Kew Garden where it was planted in 1899. Until this day the search for further specimens of the cycad E. Woodii has been futile. Given that it is a dioecious organism, it needs a reproductive counter- part to be able to reproduce in a conventional way, which has thus been impossible. But many clones of the cycad have been distributed in different botanical gardens around the globe. Encephalartos woodii is therefore the loneliest organism on the planet so to say, existing solely in the remote and scattered company of its own fragments and clones. For the work E. WOOdi, 7 of the clones and the original cycad were captured with large format analogue photography and the negatives were analogically overlaid and printed in the dark room in different constellations. On the back of the prints small stickers give an indication of the origin of the clone depicted on the front. “O” stands for what is missing.