Anetta Mona Chişa: Single pinks come and go. Farewell, red scale
Exhibition
© Field reading: Devil’s playing1 melancholy2, wind bent3 sword and spears4 all heal5, love leaves6 priest’s crown7.
Every singleone of these windows has been opened toward the street side and decoratedwith planting boxes from which climbing, blooming, wild and domestic plantsare proliferating. Taking into consideration the urban situation, the flow ofvisitors and the neighboring buildings as well as the specific property of themuntin windows, the project superficially flirts with the beautifying function ofplants, while reflecting, with the appearance of this element of privacy, on thepolitical, historical and social character of the district.
These are, however, not just randomly selected plants. Taking their “flowery” and highly allusive common English names as a point of departure, Chişa composes so-called phyto-language poems, using the names of plants to create coherent lyrical texts, the syntax of which, in turn, finds expression in the arrangement of the plants. Language as performative action is a central theme in Anetta Mona Chişa’s artistic work. The project for Kunstraum Niederoesterreich is based on the observation that traditional plant names are highlyanthropomorphized, suggesting human traits, emotions and actions. These names, which are more the product of interpretation than representation, make the plants information-carriers and message-bearers. Chişa uses these plants and their human names for performative utterances: in arbitrary, poetic arrangements, the plants respond by reflecting human needs and actions. Over the course of the installation, the linguistic assemblages will finally be transformed by the plants themselves through the natural processes of growing, flowering and withering. The inhabited windows will become an organic, biological event, based on the assumption of plant cognition. In Single pinks come and go. Farewell, red scale., the anthropocentric and logocentric focus of semiotics is replaced by a “biosemiotic turn.”
Verena Gamper
