Meeting a Flower Halfway (2020)

Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat

4k/HD video, color, 16:9, stereo sound, BE, 2021, 15’21″

Appearances by Christina Jauernik, Karin Kägi and Sirah Foighel Brutmann

Sound recording by Laszlo Umbreit, Sirah Foighel Brutmann and Eitan Efrat
Drones by Ofer Smilansky and Laszlo Umbreit
Sound mixing by Laszlo Umbreit
Color grading by Milena Trivier

Photographs by Werner Schoch (c) Staatsarchiv Appenzell Ausserrhoden
Details of drawing by Emma Kunz (c) Emma Kunz Stiftung

Produced by Messidor
Commissioned by Aargauer Kunsthaus for the exhibition Emma Kunz Cosmos, Feb 2021

Meeting a flower halfway is a work that operates as a thought experiment.
In the 1940’s, healer and artist Emma Kunz, known for her geometrical drawings of energetic maps, engaged herself in an experiment with flowers.
Allegedly Kunz would ‘polarise’ flowers, alter their cell-structure with her energy so that they would grow a predefined number of ‘daughter flowers’ out of the center calyx – the mother flower. Kunz did this with the help of a spiral rod and metal-wire models of flowers that she created.
Some of Kunz polarised flowers and models where documented by photographer Werner Schoch.
Meeting a flower Halfway looks at the entanglement and inter-action between the work of creation, imagination, how things become visible and their documentation. It rethinking the usual perceptions of cause and affect within the relation between woman and nature.