German Artist Natalie Czech Speaks the secret Language Of plants

A century ago, floral arrangements symbolized a vocabulary of their own. whereas clandestine conversation lately takes the type of a self-destructing message on Snapchat, people once crafted difficult bouquets to stealthily share a message. Sending blue cornflowers would possibly mean “be gentle with me“; honeysuckles may imply “dedicated affection”; and hyacinths could say “your loveliness charms me.”

In her collection Critic’s Bouquets, Berlin-based totally artist Natalie Czech invited several authors to write down a four hundred-phrase review of an artist’s work or exhibition of their very own choice. She then supplied a key of various plants with the sentiments they characterize, and requested the writers to pair the which means of every sentence with a bloom.

for example, Peter Scott selected to study the way in which issues Go, a film through Fischli & Weiss presented at Documenta in 1987. Scott writes, “The conduct of objects, as with folks, is rarely a certain factor,” and paired that with rhododendrons, flora that symbolize fragility, ephemerality, ardour, and temperance. This process was once repeated for each sentence. Czech then created a bouquet with the flowers and photographed them. The finished pieces—along with the bouquet percent and the written evaluation—have been exhibited at Galerie Kadel Willborn, in Dusseldorf.

“i have been interested for a long time by using the ‘language of vegetation,’ which become trendy within the Victorian Age as an important means of nonverbal verbal exchange between fanatics,” Czech says. “first of all, it’s at all times nice to obtain a bouquet, and second, flora seem beautiful. however within the Victorian Age, you had to also read the bouquet to take note or interpret its real message. i thought one day I might use it as the bottom to determine a new relationship between text and image.”

idea for the challenge arose when Czech observed that friends and neighbors would congratulate her on receiving press in newspapers and magazines by means of pronouncing, “I saw your evaluate,” no longer, “I read your review.” This got her occupied with the act of seeing as a means of interpretation.

“What i like in the mission is the interaction of views during which the critic, the viewer, and that i completely change roles,” Czech says. “The critics are determining the visual order of the bouquets throughout the sequence of their key phrases. i’m ‘staging the image’ and am concurrently the ‘editor’ of the reviews. And [as] the viewer ‘sees’ the assessment as a visual image and ‘reads’ the index of the individual words, he or she interprets the meaning, and through this also turns into the ‘author’ of the particular review.”

So say it with vegetation, because the old slogan goes.