Residence
2026
200 photographs of more than 200 felled trees on the Bogensee site in Wandlitz
Bird's-eye view before deforestation (©Dora Heinze) and a selection from the 200 individual photos (©Stephanie Bothe)
Why it feels so good to hug a tree
Stephanie Bothe’s work Residence (2026), created on the grounds at Bogensee, captures a moment of pause. The site is permeated by historical fronts that still leave their traces in the place. Stretching from left to right, it is a terrain in which history has been inscribed into the architecture: ideologies, forms of exercising power, the remnants of regimes.
Over many years, trees had gradually positioned themselves between these political fronts, preventing the gaze from moving stubbornly straight ahead. They offered protection and redirected the path. It was no longer a battlefield, but a nature reserve. The word „radical“ derives from the Latin „radix“ and literally means root. In this sense, an intervention just as radical has produced the condition in which the site is now: the trees are gone, the roots remain.
Bothe’s photographs depict the site after this transformation and show two hundred tree stumps photographed from a bird’s-eye view, looking directly onto their cut surfaces. One can see the annual rings as well as the root bases that disappear into the earth. It shows the time the trees have spent at this place and suggests that they know it differently than humans do.
As the trees disappear, the landscape changes too. Sightlines open up and the gaze wanders unimpeded into the distance. At the same time, something less visible also disappears. The air changes. Shadows are gone. Humidity, temperature, and scent take on new forms. Henry David Thoreau describes this loss as a silencing: „How can you expect the birds to sing when the groves are cut down?“[1] For now, if animals, insects, plants, and fungi are concerned, it is no longer a Wohngebiet. Now that the land has been leveled, the question arises as to how we view this place. Is it time to fall silent and stare stubbornly straight ahead?
What disappears is not gone,
it changes form
and shifts the conditions for us.
The world exists within our experience
and we exist within the experience of the tree.
[1] Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1910, p. 213.
