The Generosity of a Plant to Drop its Leaves: an Exercise in Curating Decay derives from the observation, that plants are generous in giving away both their ripe fruits and their brown leaves. However, while the value of ripe fruits for mammals and human cultures is obvious, the importance of brown leaves for composting, its contribution to the forest ecosystem is often forgotten.
The site specific installation consists of leaves of banana trees, palm trees, bromelia and fern arranged on discarded bedsteads and furniture found in the abandoned Top Club buliding. With the building in disrepair, and the leaves decomposing, the work investigates di erent forms of decay, materiality and productivity.
The Generosity of a Plant to Drop its Leaves likewise negotiates the relationship of outdoors and indoors. Fallen leaves are taken like an offering from the living ecosystem into a human housing that is the temporary exhibtion space. The bedding of the foliage appears like a ritual, relating the size and shape of the leaves to the human body and thus translating it into language of human cultures.
Storytelling and Collective Readings is an attempt to render visible the process of writing and its close links to the act of reading. The process of writing a text started as a form of notetaking in reaction to the reading of Donna Haraways Staying with the Trouble as well as physical and mental exercises in resilience in mountain region of Itatiaia National Park. While the discussing the text with a group of participants in the residency, Berlin based artist Anaïs Senli was engaging with the same literature and contributed to the project with their own reading, that took shape in the form of drawings.
Image credits: Drawings by Anaïs Senli (Untitled, 2018), printed and photographed installation view by Anaïs Senli (Peya, 2018), photos and documentation by Lena Johanna Reisner, Leonardo Avelino and Edgar Calel.
