Remember Me and Make Me Come Alive Again

A performance has its afterlife, where memory makes the act interact with other phenomena in the world. Remembering is like putting the pieces in a puzzle together. But there is a great difference. The performance act remembered will result in many different world views. In fact, it seems to me that this feature is essential to performance art.

In my memory then, the act of Cecilia Germain as a young spruce walking around in the botanical garden of Uppsala, from now on, will be connected to the visit in Paris by Kerstin Ekman in the fifties. The well known author, and withdrawn member of the Swedish Academy , commented in Swedish television on her alienism in the metropolis. - "I felt like a spruce on Place de la Concorde", she said, and the comment made me see Wild Seed in the light of a long since ongoing struggle for a language of female experience in Art.

Wild Seed, by Cecilia Germaine

The Botanical Baroque Garden

The artist is disguised as a spruce in a holt, her feet buried in the fertile soil of the Botanical Garden in Uppsala. The small spruce slowly raises her feet above the surface and starts to examine her surroundings reading the signs attached to the trees of the park. After a while she starts for a walk out in the geometrically ordered Baroque Garden holding still in front of different plants and arrangements on her way. A secret longing for something unknown guides the young spruce around. There are the akin in hedges of spruces although cut down to conformity with an unfamiliar and harsh geometry, and in the midst of it all a small plant of unknown origin awakens the love of our Spruce. She lays an egg in front of her audience in a sensual act of birth, and so she plants this wild seed in a flowerbed near bye. A fairy tale without words, the performance itself is a wild seed growing into strange thoughts about the possibilities of our nature.