The work raises the question of the supposed separation of nature and culture. The texts play with various quotations and are addressed directly to the viewer. What is nature to your culture?” is a variation on the gender-critical phrase “we won’t play nature to your culture” by the American artist Barbara Kruger from 1983. While Kruger rejects the equation of women and nature, I shift the meaning to a more general level. With my question, I am alluding to the dualism of nature and culture, which the philosopher Donna Haraway also criticises, as this contributes to nature being seen as the hierarchically lower other in contrast to human culture and civilisation. In this context, culture involves the taming of nature. The quote “do not think any breeze, any grain of light, shall be withheld” comes from the poem “Half Omen Half Hope” by Joanna Klink (2010)*. Klink’s poem reflects on various moments of love and its dissolution. To this end, she creates images of nature in which light, rain, wind and atmosphere become protagonists. This refers to the all-pervading happy moments that remain in memory even after a relationship has dissolved. And so in choosing my quote, I focus on the ambivalence of hope and failure in our relationship with nature.
— Sandra Schäfer
*Quotation from Joanna Klink’s “Half Omen Half Hope” in “Raptus” (Penguin 2010)
Sandra Schäfer, born 1970 in Altenkirchen near Bonn, lives and works in Berlin and Munich.
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