When Trees Begin to Speak

[Lars Schumacher]

On October 1, 2026, the Kunstraum MITTE37 in Burgdorf, Germany, became a space in which visual art and literature entered into a direct dialogue. Under the title Voices of the Trees, a literary gathering brought together writers, poets, publishers, and an attentive audience from across northern Germany. The event accompanied the international exhibition EXPANDED FIELD II – THE TREE, transforming the tree from a visual motif into a speaking presence: a subject of memory, myth, perception, and possible futures.

The evening emerged from a creative writing workshop held in the days preceding the reading. Rather than treating writing as an isolated act of production, the workshop approached literature as a collective process. Participants worked with fragments, rhythm, memory, observation, and the shifting relationship between human experience and the natural world. The texts that emerged from this process were subsequently brought into the exhibition space and presented as part of the public program.

The reading had originally been announced around the voices of Tarja Sohmer, Dirk Strauch, and Dr. Frank Romanowski. Yet the workshop itself generated a broader constellation of voices. Ilsemarie Petzold, Fanny Neuhaus, Katrien Wayenberg, Monika Singh, and Angelika Kocht-Buchtmann also contributed readings, extending the event beyond a conventional author presentation. What unfolded was less a sequence of individual performances than a polyphonic literary encounter: different voices approaching the same subject from different angles, allowing the meaning of the tree to remain open and unresolved.

This openness was essential to the character of the evening. Within the exhibition EXPANDED FIELD II – THE TREE, the tree is not presented simply as a botanical object. It appears as a cultural and imaginative structure: a carrier of memory, a figure of myth, and an image through which possible futures can be considered. More than one hundred works from artists in more than thirty countries approach this subject through painting, drawing, photography, collage, digital practices, and other forms of contemporary art. The literary program expanded this field by introducing another medium: the spoken word.

Where an image can make a tree visible, language can make its temporal dimension audible. A tree can become a witness to human history, a marker of place, an archive of memory, or a metaphor for continuity and loss. Roots may evoke belonging; rings may suggest accumulated time; branches may become images of divergence, relationship, or possibility. The literary works did not simply illustrate the exhibition. They created another layer of perception within it.

This distinction is important. The relationship between literature and visual art during the evening was not one of illustration. The texts did not explain the artworks, nor did the artworks function merely as scenery for the readings. Instead, both forms of expression occupied the same conceptual territory while remaining autonomous. The visual works offered material, spatial, and international perspectives; the writers introduced voice, duration, subjectivity, and the possibility of narrative. Between them emerged a field of resonance.

The presence of the writing workshop also changed the nature of the event. A conventional literary reading generally presents completed works to an audience. Here, the audience encountered literature at a different stage: writing that had recently been developed through exchange, experimentation, and collective reflection. The process remained perceptible. The event therefore revealed not only literary results but something of the conditions under which those results had come into being.

Tarja Sohmer, a literary scholar, cultural manager, novelist, publisher, and writing facilitator based in Hannover, has developed the Schreibstatt as a space for precisely this kind of collective literary practice. Dirk Strauch, a poet, translator, and publisher associated with the Burgdorf and Hannover literary scene, brings a particular engagement with poetic form, including the sonnet. Dr. Frank Romanowski, a neurologist, writer, and publisher, occupies a different position at the intersection of science, medicine, and literature. Their different backgrounds already suggest that the literary field presented at MITTE37 cannot easily be reduced to a single aesthetic program.

The additional voices of Ilsemarie Petzold, Fanny Neuhaus, Katrien Wayenberg, Monika Singh, and Angelika Kocht-Buchtmann further broadened this constellation. Their participation made the evening less about authorship as individual identity and more about literature as a network of encounters. The tree, in this sense, became an apt metaphor for the structure of the event itself: individual voices emerging from different points while remaining connected through a common ground.

The audience contributed another dimension. Among the visitors were literary readers from northern Germany, including people active themselves as poets, writers, publishers, and cultural practitioners. This was therefore not simply an audience receiving literature from a stage. It was an audience with its own literary knowledge and practices. The distinction between writer and reader became more permeable, and the atmosphere resembled an open literary salon rather than a conventional cultural event.

Such an environment matters because contemporary literature does not exist only through books and formal institutions. It also develops through workshops, small presses, readings, translations, conversations, and informal networks. These networks form a kind of cultural infrastructure: often modest in scale, but essential to the circulation of ideas and to the emergence of new work. In this respect, an event in Burgdorf can become part of a much wider cultural geography.

MITTE37 provided an appropriate setting for this encounter. As an exhibition and experimental art space, it allowed the literary program to exist within an environment already devoted to contemporary artistic practice. The physical presence of the artworks altered the act of listening. The audience did not encounter the texts in an empty room but within a visual field populated by different interpretations of the tree. The literary voice therefore became one element within a larger constellation of artistic responses.

The result was a subtle shift in perspective. The tree ceased to be merely an object represented by artists and became a conceptual meeting point between disciplines. It connected visual art with literature, individual memory with collective experience, and local practice with an international exhibition context.

There is also something inherently contemporary in choosing the tree as such a point of departure. Trees carry an unusually complex symbolic charge. They belong simultaneously to ecological reality, cultural memory, mythology, politics, and personal experience. They are living organisms and cultural symbols; they occupy physical space while also existing as powerful images within language. To speak about trees is therefore inevitably to speak about time, place, mortality, continuity, and the relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world.

The title Voices of the Trees makes this relationship explicit. Of course, trees do not literally speak. Their “voices” are produced through human attention: through observation, memory, poetry, image, and interpretation. The phrase therefore describes less an anthropomorphic claim than an artistic method. It asks what becomes audible when we allow the non-human world to enter language without reducing it to a mere backdrop for human stories.

In that sense, the evening at MITTE37 was not simply an accompanying literary event. It functioned as a small curatorial experiment. It tested what happens when an international visual exhibition is opened to another form of artistic production; when a finished exhibition becomes a site for new writing; when a workshop becomes a public reading; and when an audience composed partly of practitioners becomes part of the encounter.

What remained after the final reading was not a single interpretation of the tree, but a multiplicity of them. The event did not seek to close the subject. Instead, it allowed different voices to coexist: intimate and analytical, poetic and fragmentary, personal and cultural.

Perhaps this is where the metaphor of the tree becomes most useful. A tree does not grow as a single line. It branches. It develops in several directions at once. It carries traces of its past while continuing to produce new growth. Beneath the surface, its roots create relationships that are invisible from above.

The literary community gathered at MITTE37 suggested something similar. Individual writers retain their distinct voices, yet their work gains another dimension through exchange. A workshop becomes a reading; a reading becomes a conversation; a local gathering enters into dialogue with an international exhibition. The result is not a hierarchy of voices, but a temporary ecology of them.

Voices of the Trees therefore offered more than an evening of readings. It demonstrated how contemporary art can create spaces in which disciplines, generations, practices, and audiences overlap. Within the framework of EXPANDED FIELD II – THE TREE, the tree became not only an image to be viewed, but a proposition to be explored.

For a few hours in Burgdorf, it was also something else: a reason to listen.

EXPANDED FIELD II – THE TREE

At the centre of the exhibition EXPANDED FIELD II – THE TREE is a deceptively simple proposition: the tree as an artistic starting point. More than one hundred contributions from artists and writers in more than thirty countries respond to this invitation, transforming a familiar natural form into an international field of memory, mythology, ecology and future imagination. The exhibition runs from September 6 to October 4, 2026, at Kunstraum MITTE37 in Burgdorf, Germany.

The exhibition is curated by Lars Schumacher, whose approach places the tree within a wider understanding of contemporary artistic practice. Rather than defining a single interpretation of the motif, the project allows individual works to form a constellation. The tree may appear as an archive, carrying traces of time and history; as a mythological figure; or as an image of possible futures. Painting, drawing, photography, digital art, text and hybrid practices exist alongside one another, creating what the project describes as an expanded field in which art, ecology and memory can interact.

This curatorial openness is significant. The exhibition does not attempt to reduce the tree to an ecological symbol, although ecological questions are inevitably present. Nor does it treat nature as a decorative subject. Instead, the tree becomes a structure through which artists can consider time, identity, place, memory and transformation. Its apparent simplicity provides precisely the freedom from which very different artistic languages can emerge.

The project also extends beyond the gallery wall. EXPANDED FIELD II – THE TREE forms part of the larger PLANT AND SEED initiative, conceived as an international and process-based network. Participants were invited not only to create an artwork but, in many cases, to plant a seed or sapling. The gesture connects representation with action: the tree exists simultaneously as image, idea and living organism. The resulting archive is intended to continue growing beyond the duration of the exhibition.

This sense of growth is also central to the identity of Kunstraum MITTE37.

Located at Mittelstraße 37 in Burgdorf, MITTE37 is a young and deliberately flexible art space. It emerged from the studio environment of artist Susanne Schumacher and has developed into a hybrid platform combining exhibition practice, artistic production, temporary creative formats, cultural exchange and neighbourhood activity. Rather than operating primarily as a commercial gallery, MITTE37 presents itself as an open forum in which artists, audiences and guests can meet at close range.

The distinction matters. MITTE37 is not defined solely by what is exhibited there, but by what it allows to happen.

Its programme has already moved between different forms and networks: contemporary positions from Chicago, international Mail Art, exhibitions drawn from the Schumacher collection, interdisciplinary encounters and the EXPANDED FIELD projects. The programme announced for the coming period includes further international presentations, local workshops and formats intended to connect artists from different places and practices.

The space therefore functions less like a fixed institution and more like a laboratory. Its scale is intimate, but its artistic geography is international.

This tension between the local and the global is one of MITTE37's defining characteristics. Burgdorf provides the physical address, the immediate community and the everyday context. At the same time, the projects reach outward through international artistic networks. The exhibition THE TREE, with contributions from more than thirty nations, makes this particularly visible: a comparatively small space becomes a meeting point for a dispersed artistic community.

The host of this environment is Susanne Schumacher, whose role extends beyond that of a conventional gallery host. As an artist and cultural organiser, she has developed MITTE37 around the idea that an art space can be simultaneously personal and public, local and international, exhibition venue and place of encounter. Her own artistic practice and her long-standing engagement with international artistic correspondence and networks inform the atmosphere of the space.

Her approach can be seen particularly clearly in the earlier exhibition Sammlung Schumacher I – Mail Art Across Continents. The presentation drew on Schumacher's personal collection of international Mail Art and explored the social and artistic networks that developed around this form of exchange. The project connected MITTE37 to a history of artistic correspondence associated with figures such as Ray Johnson and the Fluxus movements of the 1960s, while presenting Mail Art as a continuing global practice based on communication, friendship and exchange.

This history helps explain why the concept of EXPANDED FIELD fits MITTE37 so naturally. The term is not simply a reference to expanding the physical boundaries of an exhibition. It suggests a different understanding of what an exhibition can be: a field in which images, texts, people, conversations, actions and networks overlap.

The literary evening Voices of the Trees therefore becomes part of this larger curatorial logic.

The writers do not enter the exhibition as an external cultural programme. Their presence activates another dimension of the project. Through the readings, the visual field acquires a temporal and vocal component. The artworks can be seen; the texts have to be heard. A painted tree occupies a surface; a literary tree unfolds in time. The exhibition becomes, for a moment, both visual archive and listening space.

The participation of the Schreibstatt collective makes this even more apparent. The texts were developed through a preceding creative writing workshop and then brought into the exhibition context. The process mirrors the larger philosophy of MITTE37: art is not treated only as a finished object but as something that can emerge through exchange, experimentation and encounter.

This is perhaps what gives the space its particular character. MITTE37 does not present itself as an institution that has already arrived at a final identity. It is still becoming itself.

Its future programme points toward continued exhibitions of painting, collage, mixed media, photography and installation, alongside conversations, workshops, international projects and more experimental interventions. A forthcoming presentation titled 37 * HAVE A LOOK is scheduled to bring together 37 international positions, while a later Sammlung Schumacher II – Donation will introduce new additions to the collection, including a donation from Boston.

The programme suggests an institution interested in movement rather than stability: between disciplines, between generations, between local and international contexts, between the artwork and the conversation surrounding it.

In that sense, the name MITTE37 is almost architectural in its simplicity. It identifies a place, but the programme continually expands beyond that address.

And perhaps this is where Susanne Schumacher's role as host becomes especially important. Hosting, in this context, is not simply a logistical function. It is a form of cultural practice. To open a studio, a collection or an exhibition space to unfamiliar artists and new audiences is to create conditions for encounters whose outcome cannot always be predicted.

The tree provides an appropriate metaphor once again.

A tree is rooted in a particular place, but its branches move outward. Its growth is local and expansive at the same time. It belongs to one landscape while remaining connected to larger ecological systems.

MITTE37 operates according to a comparable principle. Its physical centre is Burgdorf. Its artistic field is international.

And EXPANDED FIELD II – THE TREE makes that relationship visible.

The exhibition gathers distant artistic voices without erasing their differences. The writing workshop adds another layer of participation. The reading opens the visual exhibition to language. The audience, including writers, poets and cultural practitioners from northern Germany, becomes part of the exchange. What emerges is not a single statement about the tree, but a temporary ecology of perspectives.

This may ultimately be the most compelling aspect of MITTE37: its ambition is not to reproduce the scale or authority of a major museum, but to create a different kind of cultural density. A smaller space can become significant when it functions as a point of connection.

In this sense, THE TREE is both an exhibition and a proposition.

It asks what happens when an artistic motif becomes a network; when an exhibition becomes an archive; when an artwork leads to an action; when a gallery becomes a meeting place; and when literature enters a visual field not as commentary, but as another form of artistic perception.

At MITTE37, the answer is still unfolding.

The exhibition will close, but the network, the archive, the planted seeds, the conversations and the relationships created around it are intended to continue. The physical exhibition is temporary. The field it generates is designed to remain open.

That may be the most fitting way to understand EXPANDED FIELD II – THE TREE: not as a closed exhibition about trees, but as a growing artistic ecosystem — rooted in Burgdorf, reaching far beyond it, and sustained by the people who continue to add their own voices.