Due to my current move to Germany, I am thinking a lot about the position of the exile. Even though I am not necessarily a forced exile, however as an artist, as a woman, as an intellectual, an academic, I feel unrooted.
In his essay "Exile and Creativity" Vilem Flusser says “(A human) may discover that a human being is not a tree. And that human dignity may consist precisely in not having roots. That the human being becomes human only when she hacks off the vegetable roots that tie her down.”
Inspired from Flusser's text, I did a series of performative photographs, where I pose with used and thrown away Christmas trees in different parts of Berlin everyday for a week in January 2018, thus uniting with the rootless plant. I consider this position is also an act of empowerment, meaning that instead of being the victim of the exile condition, we become grounded in the air, together.
