simon barker

Lektion (Lesson)

In this short film, footage of my garden taken during the Covid epidemic, in Autumn, with plants withering and insects busily going about business as usual, is married to words taken from the English translation of the third German edition of Naturephilosophie by German natural philospher Lorenz Oken (1779 - 1851).

The text proposes a systematic and poetic understanding of all natural elements and organisms and the connections and equivalences between them. This particular selection of the text was presented with no explanation of its origins in Edith Sitwell's anthology of prose and poetry A Book of the Winter (1950).

The voiceover was spoken by Pauline Von Hellermann.

Digital video, with analogue interventions. 4 m 25 s

1 - 5 Stills from Lektion

6 Link to video

7 - 9 Stills from Lektion

"Animals are entire heavenly bodies, satellites or moons, which circulate independently about the earth.

All plants, on the contrary, taken together,are only equivalent to one heavenly body

An animal is an infinity of plants. An animal is a flower without a stem.

If the animal is the floral vesicle living from or by itself, it can no longer be fettered like the plant; between two elements; it must be nominally free from the chains of darkness, and thus from the earth.

No animal coexists in two elements like the plant, but it has all elements in itself,as the flower includes all vegetable parts.

The plant is an animal retarded by the darkness; the animal is a plant blossoming directly through the light; and devoid of root."

SCREENINGS

Gallery

Southwark Park Gallery.