SOUND OF FLOWERS – A Summer Event
John Gallas – Rachel Bingemann
“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. A flower is relatively small. Everyone has many associations with a flower — the idea of flowers. You put out your hand to touch the flower — lean forward to smell it — maybe touch it with your lips almost without thinking — or give it to someone to please them. Most people in the city rush around so they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.”
Sounds of Flowers is a summer event that celebrates moments of pleasurable contemplation at the cross-roads of different cultures and aesthetic forms; moments when the frantic rhythm of life slows and we allow ourselves to stop and smell the proverbial roses and feel the poetry that surrounds us.
Flowers are at the centre of this exhibition; their rhythms, the life they breath into the world, their capacity to speak a universal language that needs no translation; one that moves sensibilities beyond any borders and inspires artistic expressions and encounters that know no formal limitations. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1949), following English poet Alfred Tennyson, pithily noted that if we could understand one single flower, we would know who we are and what the world is. Virginia Woolf also ‘beheld the cosmos of connections in a single flower’ (Popova 2018). As powerful metaphors for how we experience the world, flowers offer fresh perspectives on the cross-disciplinary and transcultural practices that we nurture at Art Ubicua. By exhibiting them in the gallery space in multiple forms we aim to produce an estrangement effect that allows visitors to appreciate their beauty and – hopefully – to consider different ways of approaching and experiencing life. This action reminds of the works of 20th Century American artist Georgia O’Keeffe, who magnified flowers in her paintings in order to force viewers to pay attention to, and take the time to appreciate, them. But here, instead of magnifying them as O’Keeffe did, we are multiplying and altering their form in order to create a unique space for new urban encounters.
The exhibition starts with a flower poetry installation. Hanging bed linens out to dry on a sunny summer day evokes a time of restfulness, when the weather invites us to go out in the open air and enjoy the slow pace brought about by the season’s tropes. Clothes hanging from washing lines are, as well, reminiscences of exotic foreign destinations, an idyllic vision that appears while we wander around strange cities and take the time to observe the wonderful beauty in the everyday. In this summer event, we wanted to recreate the allegories embedded in those washing lines, inscribing in the free-flowing linen poems of flowers that would intensify their poetic spirit. These are not any poems about flowers, but rather haikus and tankas, typical Japanese poetry forms, written by an award-winning New Zealand poet who has been living in the UK most of his life. Our conversations with John about poetry, aesthetic forms, cultural hybridity and feelings of belonging and transculturation follow the explorations at the core of Art Ubicua’s practice.
In the following room, fresh flowers floating in the space create an immersive universe that brings an ‘explosion of wild beauty’, to cite florist Rachel Bingemann’s description of her installation – itself a response to John Gallas’ poems. Hanging in the middle of this floral outburst, two poems, one of them a translation by John into English, puts into play other challenges faced by the processes of inter-trans-cultural translation. How to capture in different signifiers the soul and musicality conjured and communicated in a different form and cultural context. We aim to explore through this not the feeling of being lost in translation, but rather the appreciation of the multiple concessions undertaken in the passage from one media to another, from one culture to another, from one perception of the material world to another. A voiceover inundates the space, reminding us of the rhythms of the life of a flower, the orchestration involved in a hybrid state of being, which continues Art Ubicua’s work in the in-between spaces of sound/music and visual arts.
Finally, in the basement we move from large-scale installations to encourage an intimate dwelling on the simplicity of a flower. Bingemann stated that ‘perhaps like the haikus written by John, these tiny arrangements invite us to consider more closely the beauty within them’. The rhythmic recitation of When you are gone (Gallas) exposes the natural circle of life, but that nostalgia for what is gone is left in the dark of the room for what could be: the promise of more flowers in an open field.
Dr Clara Garavelli
Director of Research for Art Ubicua
References:
Borges, Jorge Luis (1949) El Aleph, Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada S.R.L.
Georgia O’Keeffe cited in Elizabeth Hutton Turner (1999)
Georgia O’Keeffe: The Poetry of Things, Yale: YaleUniversity Press.
Popova, María (2018) ‘Georgia O’Keeffe on the Art of Seeing’.