![\"Susanne](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO4-IMG2-IM_Mavrokordopoulou_Kriemann_GeKcollectingplants_DSC5483_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
<\/strong>Research trip to a former uranium mining field for collecting plant matter and sheep dung, Ronneburg, 2019.
Photo: Aleksander Komarov, courtesy of the artist
<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Vegetation unmistakably traces radioactive contamination. German artist Susanne Kriemann has been exploring contaminated plants in former uranium-extraction areas in the eastern part of Germany in various iterations of her practice, most notably in the long-term project Pechblende<\/em>. Kriemann has long been interested in the invisibility of radioactivity and how radically different temporalities intersect\u2014themes that she explores through the medium of photography. Her collaborations with geologists and biologists from the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena who research the accumulation of heavy metals in former German Democratic Republic uranium territories have been crucial in that respect. The scientific group is specifically interested in certain kinds of plants that can \u201cclean up radiation\u201d by soaking up the environmental pollutants from the soil and functioning as storage for the contaminants. For an exhibition in 2016, Kriemann picked three types of weeds most fit to contain the pollutants from Gessenwiese, an area in the former GDR that is heavily polluted by toxic metals. Like a florist, she dried false chamomile, wild carrot, and ox tongue and arranged them in carefully composed bouquets, and then named the work after them.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Susanne Kriemann\u2019s exhibition Falsche Kamille, Wilde M\u00f6hre, Bitterkraut<\/em> took place at RaebervonStenglin in Zurich, October 15\u2013 November 18, 2016.<\/span>. Far from flamboyant, however, the result is rather barren, reminiscent of what one might find in a geologist\u2019s fieldwork nook, transitorily staged with soil and plant samples. Next to the floral arrangement lie photograms produced by placing the flowers directly onto photosensitive paper. The resulting black-and-white images depict the harvested plants and are rather blurred. They are meticulously labelled with the names of all the pollutants contained in each plant \u2014 uranium, mercury, lead, gadolinium, and aluminum, to name but a few. The list is long and unfolds next to each picture like the label of a specimen found in a natural history museum, replete with terms that sound recognizable but remain uncharted territory. Regardless of the unfamiliarity of such jargon, however, what these metals share is their ability to contaminate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Once inhaled by the miners who worked in the mine shafts, particles of these metals irrevocably became part of them but also of their lineage, as genetic mutations were passed onto subsequent generations. Rather than being a singular event contained in time, toxic exposure lives on through its effects, wreaking havoc over and over. It is precisely this longevity that is illuminated by radioactive flowers. What we see in the exhibition space is the clashing of toxicity\u2019s multifold temporalities. On the one hand, the past is figured through the specimens themselves, illustrating the plant\u2019s life and sending us back to the ground where the false chamomile grew and blossomed. On the other hand, an unknown and indefinite point in the deep future is evoked by the inhuman timespans of radioactivity itself (the half-life of uranium-235 is 700 million years). Rooted in the soil, the flowers received whatever came their way and, through the artist\u2019s hand, formulated testimonies to toxicity\u2019s temporal estrangement. Ballard\u2019s time flowers protected us, unsuccessfully, from the future. Falsche Kamille, Wilde M\u00f6hre, Bitterkraut<\/em> (False Chamomile, Wild Carrot, Ox Tongue) at once exposes us to an uncertain future and prompts us to contemplate a contaminated past perpetually drawn into the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kriemann\u2019s artworks constitute an intimate working through of the violent entanglements in which we are submerged. There is an intimate quality to the gesture of picking flowers, arranging them in bouquets, and taking pictures of them. French artist Ana\u00efs Tondeur\u2019s work also charts the invisibility of radioactivity through a similar ethic, foregrounding how flowers can offer their own version of the radioactive present. In 2016, in collaboration with philosopher and plant savant Michael Marder, she compiled a herbarium from plants that sprouted in the grounds of the Chernobyl exclusion zone. The resulting book, The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness<\/em>, interweaves text and image. It includes photograms of plants collected in the area, created by Tondeur, and poetic reflections on the event of Chernobyl and its ongoing impact, in fragmentary form, authored by Marder. In addition to the scientific name of each plant and the year of creation, the label of each photogram informs us of an additional matter: the radiation levels of the specimens. Most range around 1.7 microsieverts\/h. Still highly radioactive, the no-go zone abounds in plants and species whose genetic make-up is still undergoing transformation, most notably through exposure to the radioactive element cesium-137. Accounting for the continuous effects of radioactivity in the present, Marder notes in one of his written fragments, \u201cThirty years subsequent to what happened in Chernobyl, the risks of using atomic energy are no longer a matter of the future; they are the already actualized threats that spill over into and overshadow the present.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Michael Marder and Ana\u00efs Tondeur, The Chernobyl Herbarium: Fragments of an Exploded Consciousness<\/em> (London: Open Humanities, 2016), 34. 71. The publication contains thirty written fragments, each an homage to the thirty years that had passed since the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986.<\/span>The pictures of the vegetal imprints possess something processual, as if they are still radiating. Some of them have a grainy surface, and all of them are blurred, suggesting movement rather than the photographic freeze of time. It\u2019s very much the present, or perhaps a presence, that these images incite us to consider.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In that regard, the choice of the herbarium is not incidental but rather foundational. A herbarium is a collection of dried specimens put together according to a classification system in the form of a book. It was a central classificatory technology of the colonial era, used to harvest and classify plants during European explorations. Conventionally, a herbarium includes the actual plant or flower in desiccated form. The Chernobyl Herbarium, then, is a peculiar kind of herbarium: a herbarium without plants. It does, however, denote their presence, sketching their contour and shape, as well as the radioactivity trapped in them. It doesn\u2019t deliver the actual object, only a shadow of it. In a sense, Tondeur\u2019s haunted photograms, like those in Kriemann\u2019s Falsche Kamille, Wilde M\u00f6hre, Bitterkraut<\/em>, suggest the bony imagery of the x-ray. The technology of the x-ray and the photogram are, of course, closely linked. Like photograms, x-rays leave behind a visual print on a photosensitive surface. Furthermore, they do so in a manner that simultaneously reveals and obscures their subject matter. Choosing such photographic technologies ascribes a revelatory power to flowers, albeit one that remains ambiguous, leaving open whether it is a presence or an absence that we are looking at. The floral imprints only emphasize further this hovering between visibility \u2014 discernibility \u2014 and its complementary invisibility, concealment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alongside this oscillation, the aesthetic of the natural history museum lingers in the background of both Tondeur\u2019s herbarium and Kriemann\u2019s scientific inventory, surfacing occasionally in deconstructed form. Rootless, the flowers of Tondeur\u2019s herbarium exist in retreat, imprints of an event that is here to stay. The nuclear catastrophe that is Chernobyl is thus outlined as a permanent state of affairs, invisibly but indelibly part of our present, an inevitability that we need to work through. Marder contends, \u201cThe \u2018outwardness\u2019 of fallout is never final. Invariably, it leads to incorporation, depositing radioactive elements in the body and its organs, in the earth and its layers, in the plant and its roots and leaves.”5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Ibid., 44. 95.<\/span>Is it ultimately our selves that we detect in these plants? Marder invites us to consider the permeable boundaries among bodies, environments, and toxic substances. So does Kriemann: the ink used to jot down the list of toxic metals present in the weeds in Falsche Kamille, Wilde M\u00f6hre, Bitterkraut is derived from a pulp of these same flowers. The work\u2019s description interprets it as aiming to draw a direct link between maker and tool, between subject and material.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Authorless text published on the website of the artist\u2019s gallery. https:\/\/wilfriedlentz.com\/work\/pechblende-all-series-2016-18\/<\/a>.<\/span>. The artist is suggesting that there is a tight rapport between bodies and matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Without turning a blind eye to suffering and the unjust distribution of radioactive particles across the globe, the artworks of Kriemann and Tondeur showcase an enigmatic co-creation \u2014 indeed, a collaboration. The herbarium and the camera-less photographs of plants cling to something other than flowers as a symbol of the cycle of life. Intimately, but also scientifically, Kriemann and Tondeur form curious alliances with radioactive flowers. Within local contexts of nuclear issues, their respective practices impart a particular process of making, assigning a new status to plants. They relentlessly pluck, organize, study, analyze, and classify flowers and, after collaborating with scientists, produce their own classification systems,perhaps of an artistic kind? The most valuable of collaborators, however, are to be found in the flowers themselves. Kriemann\u2019s and Tondeur\u2019s staged vegetal encounters are reminiscent of what anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing describes as \u201ccontamination as collaboration.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span>\u201d 7 <\/a> - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Le champignon de la fin du monde : Sur les possibilit\u00e9s de vivre dans les ruines du capitalisme<\/em>, traduit de l\u2019anglais par Philippe Pignarre, Paris, La D\u00e9couverte (Les Emp\u00eacheurs de penser en rond), 2017, p. 65. 65<\/span>In Tsing\u2019s view, the age of the Anthropocene necessitates that we become attuned to ways of collaboratively adapting to human-disturbed ecosystems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n The intoxicated flowers are not to be discarded in the frame of art practices as devoid of value, but to be incorporated in challenging human-nonhuman collaborations. To describe this floral collaboration as the artists\u2019 alone would be to forget how the artwork changes because of the radioactive, contaminated nature of the flowers. After all, it is this feature of the flowers that attracted the artists in the first place. Where Kriemann and Tondeur dovetail is in their commitment to glean an aesthetics of contamination from the radio active plants.<\/p>\n\n\n![\"Susanne](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO4-IMG8-IM_Mavrokordopoulou_SK_SusanneHefti_RvS-Repros_Kriemann-12_CMYK-C_resultat.jpg\")
<\/strong>Falsche Kamille<\/em>, 2016.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Susanne](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO4-IMG7-IM_Mavrokordopoulou_SK_SusanneHefti_RvS-Repros_Kriemann-11_CMYK-C_resultat.jpg\")
<\/strong>Wilde M\u00f6hre<\/em>, 2016.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO4-IMG3-IM_Mavrokordopoulou_Tondeur_Dolichos-Pruriens_CMYK-C_resultat.jpg\")
Dolichos Pruriens<\/em>, from the project Tchernobyl Herbarium<\/em>, 2016\u2013ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO4-IMG4-IM_Mavrokordopoulou_Tondeur_Linaceae_CMYK-C_resultat.jpg\")
Linacea<\/em>, from the project Tchernobyl Herbarium<\/em>, 2016\u2013ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO4-IMG5-IM_Mavrokordopoulou_Tondeur_Unknown-specie_CMYK-C_resultat.jpg\")
Unknown specie<\/em>, from the project Tchernobyl Herbarium<\/em>, 2016\u2013ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO4-IMG6-IM_Mavrokordopoulou_Tondeur_Linum_usitatissimum_18_CMYK-C_resultat.jpg\")
Linum usitatissimum<\/em>, from the project Tchernobyl Herbarium<\/em>, 2016\u2013ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Susanne](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO4-IMG9-IM_Mavrokordopoulou_Lentz_Kriemann_GeK_C_TorJonsson_CMYK-C_resultat.jpg\")
<\/strong>Gessenwiese Kanigsberg<\/em>, installation view, Wilfried Lentz, Rotterdam, 2017-2018.
Photo: Tor Jonsson, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/99-DO4-IMG10-IM_Mavrokordopoulou_Tondeur_Phaseoleae_CMYK-C_resultat.jpg\")
Phaseoleae<\/em>, from the project Tchernobyl Herbarium, 2016\u2013ongoing.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n