The Cosmic Tree

Hildegarde of Bingen

Twelfth-Century Christian mystic Hildegaarde of Bingen was an ecological thinker – she understood the universe as an entity, each part penetrated by the essence of the whole and saw a radiance in creation – in the greening of the earth, the sprouting of seeds, and blossoming of plants. She called this verdant fecundity Viriditas, a ‘greening’ of the planet that is infused with a spiritual principle and a healing potential that can bring about planetary attunement. The Botanical Mind draws inspiration from Von Bingen’s cosmology – in her amalgamation of science, mysticism and art and her belief that images and music and have the potential to awaken humanity to mysterious truths of the universe.

Michael Marder on Hildegard of Bingen

In a forthcoming title Green Mass: The Ecological Theology of St. Hildegard of Bingen, Marder reflects on the significance of vegetal life in von Bingen’s theology. Her ‘language of plants’ was not bound by symbolism and allegory; it described the vegetal kingdom as a world infused with spirituality and understood religion, not only metaphorically, through the being of plants. The word play of Marder’s title alludes both to the most material and the mundane: the plant world representing the largest physical biomass on our planet and liturgical Church service belonging to the spiritual realm – immaterial, ethereal.

Marder collaborated with Swedish composer and cello performer, Peter Schuback, who has written a musical composition to accompany the book, each movement resonating with the themes of Marder’s chapters. Here we share Chapter 2: Analogies with the corresponding musical accompaniment by Peter Schuback.

Adam Chodzko

Adam Chodzko is an artist working across media, exploring our conscious and unconscious behaviour, social relations and collective imaginations through artworks that are propositions for aberrant forms of ‘social media’.

This new digital commission has been developed specially for The Botanical Mind. Working with computer coders, Black Shuck, Chodzko has developed an algorithm that searches for ciphers - signs and letters created for a secret language, the Lingua Ignotae, by the 12th Century Christian mystic Hildegard von Bingen. The algorithm scans footage of undergrowth, woodland and forest, looking for the ciphers in the shadows between and under the vegetation. Chodzko has assigned each character a sound, taken from the opening phrases of Hildegard’s choral compostions: O Viridissima Virga (O branch of freshest green) and O Frondens Virga (O blooming branch, you stand upright in your nobility, as breaks the dawn on high). Once located, the ciphers are sequenced to spell out names of plants she catalogued in her writing as well as deviating to create new hybrid plants. 

Chodzko has speculated that this secret language – a code she developed some 900 years ago – might be received as a message to us now, or as a plan for the future. The work attempts to recover, mobilise and enact it as an ecstatic experience, generated through a system of channelling – of light, darkness, language, naming, plants and nature – a possible path toward an infinite Eden.

This is a clip from the work which plays out infinitely, in real time, and attempts to become an idea of botanical transformation – at once both a process and its experience.

Sarah Angliss

In a forthcoming podcast - Hildegarde Von Bingen - The Threads Of The Air - due to be released on June 19, musician Sarah Angliss draws on the botanical writing of Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century Christian mystic, to help make sense of her own experiences of illness, healing and the turn of the season while the city is in lockdown. Sarah will immerse us in a sonic fever dream, using fragments of Hildegard’s texts on herbal medicine to explore her personal experiences of fever as she examines Hildegard’s ecstatic visions. She discusses how Hildegard’s progressive approach to washing rituals and the observation of nature reverberate through the ages. At a time when we’re facing a new pathogen that reveals the limits of modern medicine, it’s hard not to feel an affinity with people who experienced contagions in Hildegard’s time. We’re retreating to measures that would not have seemed unfamiliar to her, in the absence of a cure. This podcast features a score specially written by Sarah, which responds to Hildegard’s writing on The Threads of The Air - describing the purifying properties of the air as summer comes and goes.

Composer, performer and electronic artist Sarah Angliss creates finely-wrought music, hard to classify, where acoustic instruments, electronics and robotics, aiming to create a soundworld with a sense of the uncanny and a powerful emotional heft. “Music possessed of an eerie instability…a whole universe unto itself brimming with fresh propositions and new directions…a shimmering, minimalist masterpiece.” (The Wire Magazine). 

Sarah Angliss’s highly inventive work reflects an eclectic musical background. A classically-trained composer and instrumentalist, who specialised early on in both electronics and ancient music, Sarah also has a background in biologically-inspired robotics. She combines these disciplines to create her highly distinctive soundworld. A prolific live performer, Angliss also applies her unusual sonic techniques to theatre. In 2018 Sarah received a Composer’s Award from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

Our new podcasts are presented by Camden Art Audio. Listen and subscribe to our via iTunes, Spotify and on Android. 

Andrea Büttner

Andrea Büttner’s (b. 1972, Stuttgart, Germany) conceptually-oriented practice alternates between forms like the woodcut, which privilege the use of the hand and the rough interaction of materials, and research-based projects that delineate the broader contexts in which her ideas circulate. She has an open engagement with philosophical texts and her use of imagery at times evokes religious themes, particularly those associated with Catholic monastic traditions.

In these three series of images, artist Andrea Büttner reveals the now-overgrown planting-beds and greenhouses in a former Nazi concentration camp, contemplates the significance of moss as a cryptogram for smallness, shame and hidden sexuality, and the various appearances of potatoes in her work.

Moss / Littleness

“Since 2010 mosses have featured in various works and exhibitions of mine. Moss gathers where surfaces are left alone and is something small that can be found nearly everywhere. This “letting alone” would seem opposed to the demands of productivity. Moss is also a slang word for money in German. At first, my interest in moss was sculptural, but eventually I came to understand a connection between moss and shame. Being small and reproducing via spores, mosses have a hidden sexuality (this is the literal translation of the way biologists classify moss: as cryptogamous). Hidden sexuality has to do with shame. And smallness has to do with shame.”

Potato

“The potato appears often in my work – from glass paintings to woodcuts, and most recently as a ceiling painting – and I use it to speak about realism, about poverty, about Vincent Van Gogh and Courbet. I show potatoes to establish a distance from aesthetic ideas of high versus low, of elegance and intellectuality. The round form or lump is an element form of matter (bread, feces, money).”

Biodynamic Agriculture and National Socialism

“Last year I made a video, Karmel Dachau, about a Carmelite convent that was founded in 1964 adjacent to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. I've known this convent since my childhood.

Next to the concentration camp memorial, former greenhouse structures and the concrete borders of plant beds still exist. They were part of the plantation at the Dachau concentration camp, where the prisoners had to work and were killed by labor. One of the purposes of the Nazi’s plantation was cultivate German drugs, German herbs, and to do research in biodynamic gardening.”