„I see people with lemons in their hands and they will say: he was a good man, he was a good man.“
From ‘Woyzeck’, Georg Büchner 1837
ROSES AND LEMONS
I was invited by the ISAS Institut Dortmund to take part in a public commission celebrating its 60th anniversary. The ISAS is integrated into the Leibnitz association and its research focusses mainly on material, interface and bio analytics. This research requires not only highly specialized scientists but also advanced technical tools and I had access to their scanning electron microscope (SEM), which I used for my artistic work. Under this microscope I looked at components of a red rose such as leaf, thorn and flower petal and at components of a lemon like zest, pulp and pip.
In the arts flowers and blossoms symbolise most notably female beauty and carnal lust. Because of their short lifespan flowers are associated with the transience of earthly life. In the 17th century flowers were constituents of the symbolic Vanitas still life paintings in the Netherlands. This style of painting reached its peak during the baroque period. At the same time the notion of the rose as the queen of the flowers was established in Europe. However, already since antiquity, red roses are considered as a symbol of love.
The origin of the lemon is not fully explained. Presumably the lemon goes back to a crossing between various citrus fruits such as the bitter orange and the citron with its thick rind at approximately 1000 AD in North India. Through the then Islamic cultural area the lemon spread from India to Spain and to the South of Italy. Lemons were cultivated there since the 13th century.
In 1347 the Black Death arrived via Sicily in Europe and 25 million people died of the disease within six years. Every third European fell victim of the Black Death. At that time medical knowledge was rudimentary. There was little understanding of the causes of diseases and it was believed that bad odors were the origin of illness. Hence the mourning crowd at a funeral ceremony carried lemons or other citrus fruits. In this sense the lemon became a symbol for mourning until Robert Koch’s discovery of the pathogenic germ in 1876.
Love and mourning are opposites and relate to each other like Ying and Yang. I decided to realize this idea in black and white images as I aim to visualize love and mourning in its pure form. The photographic pieces are compositions of three different images, which are mounted in a similar way like a medieval winged altarpiece, only the pieces called Proben (Tests) are single images.
For the arts festival Rundlauf I wallpapered public spaces in Bochum with different micrographic images of the series Roses and Lemons. I chose distinct places at key points of the Speckschweiz, a district of Bochum where the festival took place. Due to the huge format of the images the enlargement is now gigantic.
Translation: Babette Martini
In the arts flowers and blossoms symbolise most notably female beauty and carnal lust. Because of their short lifespan flowers are associated with the transience of earthly life. In the 17th century flowers were constituents of the symbolic Vanitas still life paintings in the Netherlands. This style of painting reached its peak during the baroque period. At the same time the notion of the rose as the queen of the flowers was established in Europe. However, already since antiquity, red roses are considered as a symbol of love.
The origin of the lemon is not fully explained. Presumably the lemon goes back to a crossing between various citrus fruits such as the bitter orange and the citron with its thick rind at approximately 1000 AD in North India. Through the then Islamic cultural area the lemon spread from India to Spain and to the South of Italy. Lemons were cultivated there since the 13th century.
In 1347 the Black Death arrived via Sicily in Europe and 25 million people died of the disease within six years. Every third European fell victim of the Black Death. At that time medical knowledge was rudimentary. There was little understanding of the causes of diseases and it was believed that bad odors were the origin of illness. Hence the mourning crowd at a funeral ceremony carried lemons or other citrus fruits. In this sense the lemon became a symbol for mourning until Robert Koch’s discovery of the pathogenic germ in 1876.
Love and mourning are opposites and relate to each other like Ying and Yang. I decided to realize this idea in black and white images as I aim to visualize love and mourning in its pure form. The photographic pieces are compositions of three different images, which are mounted in a similar way like a medieval winged altarpiece, only the pieces called Proben (Tests) are single images.
For the arts festival Rundlauf I wallpapered public spaces in Bochum with different micrographic images of the series Roses and Lemons. I chose distinct places at key points of the Speckschweiz, a district of Bochum where the festival took place. Due to the huge format of the images the enlargement is now gigantic.
Translation: Babette Martini