Rush Song

Address at the opening of the exhibition Betina Kuntzsch BINSENLIED on 26 April 2025.

By Michaela Nolte

A line glows and wanders across the wall. It forms into leaves and flowers, into a plant. Common loosestrife or lesser celandine emerge, move through the room and disappear again.

As they take shape, the strokes – or rather the one line with which Betina has drawn each of these plants – are transformed into roots and flowers, leaves and figures, some with animistic features, in animations that are as moving as they are animated. Hybrid forms and hybrid creatures that interact.

In Betina Kuntzsch’s latest audio-video installation, we can watch plant species germinate, observe their growth and blossoming, but also their fading until they crumble back to earth.

Growth in fast motion as a graceful and dynamic dance of nature, as a symbol of becoming and passing in the loop of our existence.

The expansion of the lines in space – unfolds – sometimes as a shimmering rhythm -, sometimes in a calm, meditative flow – space – for imagination.

Hawkweed can be heard there – złośana tšawa or bittersweet nightshade, also known as wolf’s eye, wjelkowe woko. Plant names that have a wonderfully sensual appeal on their own and in the harmony of the German and Wendish terms, the often diverse and imaginative names.

Transitions and dialogues across borders and languages between plants and viewers, but also between the actors of the flora themselves. Plants have their own form of language. They communicate via scent molecules or via networks, for example between trees and fungi.

Just as the diverse forms of existence in nature do not live in isolation from one another, humans do not exist on their own or independently of other life forms and ecosystems.

This has been impressively demonstrated by the American science theorist and philosopher Donna Haraway with her theory of sympoeisis, which emphasises the complex interdependencies between humans and nature and assumes that all life forms are interconnected and can only exist within this network of relationships.

Betina Kuntzsch explores these multi-layered connections and links. She draws, invents and animates a dynamic picture of nature and its iridescent processes. In our imagination, we can then visualise all the worms and tiny creatures that crawl and flit between the plants, above and below the ground.

At the interface between narrative and spatial reference, the rush song resounds on intertwined and overlapping paths across walls and corners, floors and ceilings. At times the contours grow delicately, as in the case of the roof house root, then again the densely woven threads of the cotton grass proliferate into a bulky materiality in the immaterial medium.

The stylised plant images form a kind of tableau vivant of the still life or, as Michel Foucault called it, an ‘incorporeal materiality’.

Karl Blossfeldt, whose photographic studies of plants in the 1910s and 20s served to systematise them and which followed strict formal criteria in the spirit of New Objectivity, wrote in the foreword to his book Wundergarten der Natur:

“My plant documents should help to re-establish a connection with nature. They should reawaken a sense of nature, point out the abundant wealth of forms in nature and encourage people to observe our native flora for themselves”. Thus Blossfeldt in 1932 and his plea for what we now call mindfulness and biodiversity seems almost like a truism.

Our treatment of the planet, the permanent threat to the atmosphere and biodiversity can be heard almost hourly in the news and are underpinned by new studies on a daily basis. The question remains as to why we find it so difficult to translate all this knowledge into action or even to anchor it more firmly in our consciousness.

A speech entitled ‘This is water’, which David Foster Wallace gave to students at a college ceremony in 2005, begins with the following parable:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

The US writer ironically questions our blindness to the obvious, our self-certainty and our ego-centred thinking.

‘This is water’ and we swim in it so naturally that we have no awareness of its existence, let alone its essence.

In his speech, Foster Wallace philosophised about this seemingly banal fact in his incitement to thought and proves with the parable that thinking can sharpen our perception and understanding of others and empower us to sympathise and empathise. And it is precisely empathy that is currently being castigated as a weakness by politicising US billionaires.

But Betina Kuntzsch’s video drawing is a subtle wake-up call. After all, some of the plants that are called out here acoustically and visually are threatened with extinction.

The original starting point for this poetic audiovisual poem was the Red List of endangered plant species in Brandenburg, with a particular focus on the Spreewald. The Red List lists 229 endangered plant species for this region alone.

In Betina’s BINSENLIED, their names can be heard in German and in Lower Sorbian – the language of the Sorbian minority living there. This creates a link between nature, the environment and culture; after all, the Sorbs, their customs and traditions, their culture and especially their language are also endangered.

Only through careful management have they survived the decimation and decline caused by lignite mining, among other things, which has destroyed entire areas, reduced biodiversity and torn people and village communities apart through resettlement.

On the other hand, it also creates jobs or new and comfortably furnished homes for the people transplanted in this way. In this sense, two documentary photographs point to the present of this region… (excerpt)