«A tree!?» you may exclaim, surprised.
«Do you have any objection?!» says the tree.

This year’s program at Der TANK has been developed to help us think about certain issues that occupy our minds. For centuries we have had the privilege to be able to articulate what we feel. During the same period, we have witnessed art take on the role of the producer of a certain type of experience, one that is different from others, and that bears no relation to function. But it would be interesting to reverse this idea, to see art and artworks not as producers of a certain type of feeling or experience but as an organ, a historically developed organ, that actually feels us, feels the world.

I recently reread a text by Gilles Deleuze in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). «We’re tired of trees,» he writes. «We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much.» The French philosopher was, of course, thinking about the tree as an image, a metaphor for genealogical thinking, about Modern dualism, etc. … Here is not the place for philosophy, but for TREE (Abies Alba) itself, because, we are all sure, this tree would disagree with Deleuze.

TREE (Abies Alba) is a new sculpture realized by artist Johannes Willi, with the help of Vera Bruggmann, and commissioned especially for Der Tank, the Institut Kunst’s annex exhibition space of its sculpture workshop. TREE (Abies Alba) is also part of this year’s curriculum focusing on the expansion of the notion of experience. Sensing from trees is an exercise that helps us to reflect on the way we think about artistic production today, about the space left between conceptual forms of art and avant-garde ideas of form and form’s reverse. An organic form modified by an artist is now a sculpture. The numerous examples in mythology of humans morphing into animals illustrate the different ways we engage with intelligence, a journey from human reason to the idea of human-as-animal; from intuition to instinct. There are, however, fewer examples of similar transfers between humans and plants. Plants, which do not have a spine or a centralized nervous system, are assumed to be further away of an articulated intelligence. Yet lately science and art have discovered in plants an incredibly eloquent form of sensing the world. Like the bacteria that inhabit our body and determine the information processed by neurotransmitters, trees are also blind and, at the same time, able to breathe and modify entirely our environment. This TREE here is a humble species, free from all the metaphorical struggles we have—historically—put tress through. TREE (Abies Alba) is here to meet us, to sense us. TREE (Abies Alba) has hands and gummy hair. It has been through the life and limits of industrialization. It is a TREE of the world, so to say. Its major purpose, though, is to gather and see how this piece of life is also artistic research.