In 1979 Ed Ruscha is said to have placed a man-sized rock he created in the Mojave Desert, left in the midst of other rocks. Yet still to this day no one has found “Rocky II” – not even french artist Pierre Bismuth¹.

On pages 204–205 of a 1934 specimen by the American Type Founders I was intrigued by a typeface I found which looked wavy, like an air blast or a limb of a tree being moved by air — it was called Vanity Initials, and was drawn in 1922 by American Art Nouveau illustrator Will H. Bradley. It was missing the letters O Q X Z and all lowercase characters, but it had five different “The’s“ to choose from. You may or may not find one of them now, somewhere around this location.

¹ “Where is Rocky II?“ (2016), directed by Pierre Bismuth, is a documentary film about his ten-year search for the rock.

We have a library. The library is part of the new graphic design masters program at the Estonian Academy of Arts. We have books and publications in Tallinn and here, in Berlin. In the fall of 2020, when the library was started, it was only a small box. Our collection of books is growing quite fast. Now I can’t keep count of how many books we have. These books and publications are essentially meant to be read. These books and publications are selected and collected by us – the students and teaching staff of the EKA GD MA-program. This reader is a narrow selection of texts from the library. It is an early attempt to make our library more public than it is now.

I was thinking about 53-61 and 53-65. They are connected by numbers, by classification and surely they are connected by their lower, underground bodies, but I wondered if they ever get to interact on the surface-level.

Here are some small signs speaking of a big, short-lived, indirect touch I witnessed. A sequence, maybe a trailer for a rom-com, around a happenstance where a touch gets carried from one surface to another. From tree #53-61 to tree #53-65. Circulate around and clap your eyelids together for a zoom in.

– I’m taking my houseplant for a walk today, (05.03.2021).

When going to a park or forest, we rarely question if the plants and trees we see around us are actually meant to be there. Likewise, when we go for a walk, we leave our “house” plants in closed doors, also without questioning much if they too are meant to be there. Today, plants form an important part of our indoor environment. Ironic however, is that the “indoors” wasn’t even a thing until very recent times in the history of the Earth. And although we tend to call them “houseplants” or “indoor plants”, Nature never actually created them that way. We seem to forget that houseplants are living beings that evolved over the millennia outdoors and are not just a trendy decoration in our houses. Plants, just like us, are active and intelligent beings that are appropriate recipients of respect and care.

When walking through Tiergarten I observed all the engraved letters and numbers on the trees. Since a while I’ve been interested in the phenomenon of ‘leaving a mark‘. It is often meant as a gesture, a reminder of our existence as human beings, being able to communicate using our surroundings as a surface or canvas.

On further research I came across mesopotamian clay balls, which date back 5,500 years and have been found in the late sixties in Iran. Similar artefacts have been found around the world for example in Scotland and Turkey. These mysterious clay balls carry different engraved symbols, but it still remains unclear what they mean in prehistoric times, before even the invention of writing.

We are the very first participants of this newly opened MA program, and acknowledge this moment by collectively leaving our mark here. This clay ball bears symbols, signatures and the recorded marks of everyone in our group.

Everything that comes from the earth must return, and so will this tree. I don't know about its past, but I can only assume why it ended. I was drawn to the tree out of empathy, out of necessity for companions that we lack in times like these. That hunch made me want to preserve that particular moment and my new companion. Reasons, why I would want to preserve something that is already gone are difficult to explain through words because it is often intuition that guides me. Some moments like this are not made to be understood through words, but by being present. Let my words be a guide rather than an explanation for how you must preserve this tree yourself.

24th of February 2021. As I approached this tree I thought it was a nice sitting spot — probably always free, because it doesn't resemble a bench. It was a rather warm day, the sun held me in its warm embrace while I read an essay by Virginia Woolf where she wrote about poetry: “The very reason why poetry excites one to such abandonment, such rapture, is that it celebrates some feeling that one used to have, so that one responds easily, familiarly without troubling to check the feeling, or to compare it with any that one has now.”¹ I couldn't find better words to explain my reasons for wanting to bring attention to this tree.

There are many parts to preserve from this tree, but I wanted to emphasize that this tree belongs to the park. The trees here have cut off limbs, scars from people. Biologist and plant pathologist Alex Shigo introduced a concept that when tree limbs are cut away they start to heal themselves in a process he calls Tree Compartmentalization. This is where a tree begins to protect itself by either slowing or preventing the spread of disease and decay through the forming of “walls” around a wounded area ².

The same concept of compartmentalization is used in psychology and it is described as a subconscious psychological defense mechanism used to avoid cognitive dissonance or the mental anxiety caused by a person having conflicting values, cognitions, emotions, and beliefs within themselves. I saw this as a beautiful metaphor that we share and thought that these plates, which are made of impressions from the spots that mark where the limbs were cut off, are a reminder of the walls that we build. By breaking and leaving them afterwards we might leave this spot with fewer scars of our own. This tree and the plates will be gone someday and so will we as walk back to the “parks” we call home—but before we do that, let's sit down.

¹ "A Room of One's Own" essay by Virginia Woolf

² “Compartmentalization of Decay in Trees” Alex L. Shigo

Three dimensional letters, locked with a bicycle chain to an object in public space, the letters say “BOM” (well in Portuguese) and contain food for the birds in the park.