Leonie Bradner and Nina Guo
I explore the fleeting feeling of being part of an unstable system through large-scale installations, texts, songs and performances. The starting points of many of my projects are objects, plants, or stories that have ties into ancient history yet somehow have lost their context. They are mementos, traces, and vestiges of something bigger that no longer exists: ghosts of an ancient past, aliens in this day and age. I try to give these artefacts, these stories, new contexts, new ways of being in this world. I see my work as a way to weave cosmologies: I tie personal stories to ecological themes and myths and histories to create delicate vessels for fragile orders that shimmer, vibrate and remain in constant motion.
Title: If Only
‘If Only’ is a short film that emerged out of a sung performance for 50 singers of all ages, reviving the mythical stories and medical knowledge of the legendary mandragora plant. The performance took place in 2024 as part of the Kunstlokal Festival in Switzerland. Whereas the performance lasted 35’, the film is an experimental documentation reworking the performance in only 10’.
The thousand-year-old story of the mandragora tells of a plant in human form that screams when it is pulled out of the ground. As much as the legend is a product of the human imagination, the mandragora it describes is a plant rooted in the physical world; in ancient Greece the plant was used as a sleeping pill and as a narcotic during operations and is known as one of the best recorded gynaecological herbal substances across history.
‘If Only’ embeds the history of the mandragora in a contemporary context and uses it as a means to try and understand how we humans find meaning in a world that is more mysterious than our minds can comprehend. The piece pays homage to a magical plant and to our deepest dreams, wishes and fears.