HILDA 2024 | Duo Exhibition: Am Ryck, University of Greifswald – Botanical Garden
Exhibition view: Am Ryck, Duo Show with Alison Darby
In her multimedia installation Hilda (2024), Juliane Tübke sheds light on the vegetal life of the drained peatland landscapes around the Ryck meadows in Greifswald; the title “Hilda” refers to the earliest documented name of today’s Ryck river. Over the course of a year, she conducted site-specific research and talked to residents, farmers and scientific experts as well as landscape ecologists and biologists from the Greifswald Mire Centre. Tübke is particularly interested in the role of plants for peatlands, especially reeds and black alder. Tübke recognizes plants as powerful agents that shape ecosystems and co-create habitats. (...) Text: Ulrike Gerhardt
Installation views: Erl (2024), Porcelain clay, spray paint, grids
Because of its occurrence at “wet” locations such as streams, swamps and peatland, the alder tree holds a fixed position in myths and legends. For her installation made from porcelain clay and called ERL (2024), Juliane Tübke took impressions of alder wood which turns red when cut. This work focuses on the question of how the returning water resulting from rehydration would affect the landscape and the alder forest on the Steinbecker Vorstadt polder. At first, the alders would drown due to fluctuating water levels, only to sprout again afterwards. In their flesh-like colour and dynamic form, the sculptures speculate on the shape of the “new nature” after a possible rehydration, in which the pieces of wood and bark promise a future past their end.
Erl (2024), Detail
Installation view: CUTS (2024), Video, loop
The video work CUTS (2024) is a key work in the exhibition: A drone flight across the present-day Steinbecker Vorstadt polder. The images show a tracking shot across a snow-covered landscape. First across the Ryck river, which emerges from the mist with a dark glow that is reminiscent of its origins as wet peatland. From the Ryck, the view extends over the dyke, crosses the alder forest and finally shows the cuts in the landscape formed by the construction of drainage ditches. This landscape relief exposes the man-made scars of a damaged ecosystem whose future remains uncertain for various reasons.
Installation view: Unter den Wiesen (2024), Video (loop)
Tübke’s special perspective on plants is also reflected in her three-part video installation Unter den Wiesen (2024) (engl. Under the meadows), in which she combines scientific and artistic imaging techniques: While in biology, fluorescent paint is used to stain cells, Juliane Tübke makes an emblematic mark by applying a pigment to the outside of the plant, revealing its surface and texture. For this installation, she chose the reed plant, a plant that consists of a richly branched underground rhizome and forms the typical stalks above ground. Accordingly, the reed plants growing on the drained peatland are connected to each other by a network that is initially ‘invisible’ to the human eye.
For Unter den Wiesen (2024), she treated the plants with phosphorescent pigment transforming them into will-o’-the-wisp-y light sources during the night that seem to communicate both with each other and the viewer. Similar to the imaginary transformations of plants within historical legends and myths, this visualization of the plant's qualities gives rise to unusual, novel and supposedly ghostly creative forms and interactions. The three screens, fixed to tripods, present the invisibly connected reed plants both in their vulnerability and in their radiance as a renewable raw material and symbol of paludiculture, agriculture and forestry on wet peatlands.
Tübke’s artistic examination of the hydrological transformations of the Ryck meadows culminates in the poetic audio piece Hilda (2024) made in collaboration with the sound artist and musician Koenraad Ecker and tracing the efficacy of the water, its aggregation states and landscape formations – featuring field recordings from the site, among other things. Composed and mixed in collaboration with Koenraad Ecker, the audio piece’s point of departure and method is a series of interviews conducted with numerous experts and scientists from the Greifswald region. It resounds throughout the greenhouse, activating the installations both historically and haptically, as it acoustically reflects the materiality of the changing water. The underlying, self-written poem subsumes and reconstructs the history of the peatlands’ development and transformation, from the Mesozoic era to the present day – at times adopting a more-than-human perspective.
Text: Ulrike Gerhardt, visual culture studies scholar, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg; associated member of the Sensing Peat network project of the Michael Succow Foundation. https://www.sensingpeat.net/
HILDA 2024 | Duo Exhibition: Am Ryck, University of Greifswald – Botanical Garden
Exhibition view: Am Ryck, Duo Show with Alison Darby
In her multimedia installation Hilda (2024), Juliane Tübke sheds light on the vegetal life of the drained peatland landscapes around the Ryck meadows in Greifswald; the title “Hilda” refers to the earliest documented name of today’s Ryck river. Over the course of a year, she conducted site-specific research and talked to residents, farmers and scientific experts as well as landscape ecologists and biologists from the Greifswald Mire Centre. Tübke is particularly interested in the role of plants for peatlands, especially reeds and black alder. Tübke recognizes plants as powerful agents that shape ecosystems and co-create habitats. (...) Text: Ulrike Gerhardt
Installation views: Erl (2024), Porcelain clay, spray paint, grids
Because of its occurrence at “wet” locations such as streams, swamps and peatland, the alder tree holds a fixed position in myths and legends. For her installation made from porcelain clay and called ERL (2024), Juliane Tübke took impressions of alder wood which turns red when cut. This work focuses on the question of how the returning water resulting from rehydration would affect the landscape and the alder forest on the Steinbecker Vorstadt polder. At first, the alders would drown due to fluctuating water levels, only to sprout again afterwards. In their flesh-like colour and dynamic form, the sculptures speculate on the shape of the “new nature” after a possible rehydration, in which the pieces of wood and bark promise a future past their end.
Erl (2024), Detail
Installation view: CUTS (2024), Video, loop
The video work CUTS (2024) is a key work in the exhibition: A drone flight across the present-day Steinbecker Vorstadt polder. The images show a tracking shot across a snow-covered landscape. First across the Ryck river, which emerges from the mist with a dark glow that is reminiscent of its origins as wet peatland. From the Ryck, the view extends over the dyke, crosses the alder forest and finally shows the cuts in the landscape formed by the construction of drainage ditches. This landscape relief exposes the man-made scars of a damaged ecosystem whose future remains uncertain for various reasons.
Installation view: Unter den Wiesen (2024), Video (loop)
Tübke’s special perspective on plants is also reflected in her three-part video installation Unter den Wiesen (2024) (engl. Under the meadows), in which she combines scientific and artistic imaging techniques: While in biology, fluorescent paint is used to stain cells, Juliane Tübke makes an emblematic mark by applying a pigment to the outside of the plant, revealing its surface and texture. For this installation, she chose the reed plant, a plant that consists of a richly branched underground rhizome and forms the typical stalks above ground. Accordingly, the reed plants growing on the drained peatland are connected to each other by a network that is initially ‘invisible’ to the human eye.
For Unter den Wiesen (2024), she treated the plants with phosphorescent pigment transforming them into will-o’-the-wisp-y light sources during the night that seem to communicate both with each other and the viewer. Similar to the imaginary transformations of plants within historical legends and myths, this visualization of the plant's qualities gives rise to unusual, novel and supposedly ghostly creative forms and interactions. The three screens, fixed to tripods, present the invisibly connected reed plants both in their vulnerability and in their radiance as a renewable raw material and symbol of paludiculture, agriculture and forestry on wet peatlands.
Tübke’s artistic examination of the hydrological transformations of the Ryck meadows culminates in the poetic audio piece Hilda (2024) made in collaboration with the sound artist and musician Koenraad Ecker and tracing the efficacy of the water, its aggregation states and landscape formations – featuring field recordings from the site, among other things. Composed and mixed in collaboration with Koenraad Ecker, the audio piece’s point of departure and method is a series of interviews conducted with numerous experts and scientists from the Greifswald region. It resounds throughout the greenhouse, activating the installations both historically and haptically, as it acoustically reflects the materiality of the changing water. The underlying, self-written poem subsumes and reconstructs the history of the peatlands’ development and transformation, from the Mesozoic era to the present day – at times adopting a more-than-human perspective.
Text: Ulrike Gerhardt, visual culture studies scholar, Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg; associated member of the Sensing Peat network project of the Michael Succow Foundation. https://www.sensingpeat.net/