­​​Late spring is the best time to harvest the delicate, light green leaves of the copper beech tree. Its fresh, slightly sour taste with an earthy note recalls sorrel. Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky’s work Vernal Unfolding (2023) starts with the memory of the aroma and the colour of these first beech leaves to unfurl after winter. This is when the trees here in Northern Europe awake from dormancy, their buds begin to sprout, their leaves start growing. Their annual cycles are starting anew, as is the process of photosynthesis. Vernal Unfolding tells of this new beginning, of transformation and emergence.

Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky explores plants she finds in her surroundings through artistic means. They become both working materials and collaborators in her practice. Using different photographic techniques, she examines their relationships to other life forms, their behaviours and specific characteristics. Over many years, she has assembled a vast collection of pressed leaves and grasses, dried twigs and photographic negatives. Seasons – in this case, spring – play an important role in her works, and the archive makes it possible to transcend their temporal boundaries. For Vernal Unfolding, Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky drew from her collection, selecting young copper beech twigs and colour negatives of beech leaves produced during other seasons.
In the colour darkroom – an important workspace in Kovacovsky’s practice – she places plant specimens on photo paper to create photograms while simultaneously exposing negatives as part of the same image. The plants surface as illuminated silhouettes, a second layer superimposed on the analogue photographs of trees. Delicate branchlets and leaves appear as dots and lines of light within the texture of the tree’s bark; minute impressions of a twig can be seen on an enlarged close-up of leaves flooded with light, now a monumental presence. The light green that reappears throughout this series is the result of a colour filter configuration, but it also replicates the hue of young leaves created by chlorophyll (from the Greek χλωρός, chlōrós – light green, fresh, and φύλλον, phýllon – leaf). Most photosynthesising organisms produce this natural pigment.

For the exhibition Promising Premises, Kovacovsky installed these large-format works in closely arranged rows in the Bärenzwinger, Berlin Mitte’s former bear pit. Once home to the Berliner Stadtbären (brown bears kept as living embodiments of the bear on Berlin’s coat of arms), the enclosure is now used as a public cultural space. As visitors moved through the forest-like assemblage of plant imagery, inside and outside became intermingled. The artist often presents her work in public spaces and in nature, gardens, parks and outdoor areas of art institutions.

For the exhibition’s closing, Kovacovsky collected young copper beech leaves and used them to prepare a sorbet. Crushed up, mixed and frozen together with sugar beet syrup and a dash of lemon, she experimented with the flavour of the beech leaves and invited visitors to a tasting where they could perceive them on a new sensory level and discuss their experiences. The photographic medium’s transformation of light is not the only parallel to the process of photosynthesis. The use of sugar in the sorbet references the way chloroplasts, responsible for this activity within plant cells, produce both oxygen and glucose from sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. Geochemist and geobiologist Hope Jahren describes these incredible capacities, which enabled life to form on Earth, as follows: “Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die.”²

Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky’s work deals with the myriad ways in which all life forms depend on plants that produce nutrients through the process of photosynthesis, enmeshing visitors in botanical worlds. Evolutionary theorist, author and professor Lynn Margulis, who is regarded as one of the most important scientists of the 20th century, researched how this process developed out of symbiotic relationships – meaning the coexistence of different types of organisms. “We are symbionts on a symbiotic planet, and if we care to, we can find symbiosis everywhere. Physical contact is a nonnegotiable requisite for many differing kinds of life.”³