Anne-Sophie Balzer
Invasive Species
Artist Statement: Talking & Listening to Plants
I’m a journalist, scholar, poet, and admirer of all things wild. My work, both artistic and within a more academic context, is focused on the more than human world that surrounds us: on glaciers and the landscapes they form when retreating, on geological formations, bodies of water, forests and edible plants. I am concerned with questions of ecological and social justice, with the therapeutic effects of creative expression and (my own) climate emotions. I love researching and it informs everything I do. Animistic philosophies, material ecocriticism, and various strains of the environmental humanities all inform my work.
In the beginning of 2020, I moved from Berlin to Norway to embark on a personal climate strike. It felt to me like an appropriate answer to a world experiencing extraordinary losses: of species, habitat, ecological connectivity, and personal connection. The year and a half spent on organic farms profoundly changed what I find valuable in life, what I keep close to my heart and what I have learned to let go of. The time spent mostly out of doors also reawakened my curiosity for plants, their life cycles and marvelous otherness. When I was a child my parents had kept a garden and taught me how to grow vegetables and harvest what nature generously provided. After years of living in big cities, I am enjoying again the simplicity of putting my hands into soil, stalking between garden beds, bending my hurting back towards the ground and experiencing the change of seasons on my skin.
When I don’t write or research you’ll find me out of doors, straying through the undergrowth of forests, birdwatching, tree-embracing, hiking along rivers, in the mountains or tending to the garden.
The poem I contributed to PHQ came about during a summer volunteering job in the Black Forest of southern Germany in 2021 where I helped remove the 100,000 + plastic covers that were used to protect tree seedlings in their first delicate years but then threatened to become human fossils, littering the forest.
When encountering the more than human, I ask myself two questions I have learned from Rachel Carson: What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see this again?
Photo Credit: Christina Ilchmann
ANNE-SOPHIE BALZER is a queer writer, poet and journalist from Berlin, Germany. She studied Literature and Cultural Studies and is currently a fellow of the doctorate program "(Re)thinking Environment" at Augsburg University. Her research focuses on glaciers in North American poetries. Before starting the fellowship, she lived and worked on a farm in Norway. Her writing frequently appears in German magazines and newspapers.