Brigham Baker: Relationships

12.9. - 24.10.2020


Taking out the trash, I noticed, through the evergreen overgrown fence, my neighbour. He was proudly wearing his worn, yet spotless, Stadt Zurich Entsorgung und Recycling work shirt. He has two brown rabbits and he tends to the gar- den around his house. The grill is crackling and the rabbit’s eyes are red like the moon. Fences keep the foxes away from the rabbits and make the neighbour’s grass greener than one’s own. Standing and slowly decaying, fences become one with the earth and the vegetation. Only to be removed again, masterfully and with incredible ease, to then be recycled, recoated and displaced. Displaced to keep more foxes away from more rabbits.

One doesn’t have to be a molecular biologist to know that everything around us is made of cells. Preaching the survival of the fittest, Darwin seems to have invented the motto of the neoliberal state of mind, where the grass is always greener over the fence. But isn’t the will of the cell to find its own balance really more of a symbiosis, a co- existence and co-evolution - cells adapting to one another and responding to their environment? I wonder if there were no fence, would all grass be the same hue of green?


Would there be balance or does even the idea of it seem as ungraspable as capturing the fluff of a thistle? That soft feathery material that protects the seeds and then flies off and travels miles and miles, transporting them and conquering places far from home. The thistle, a true nomad. Soft, ungraspable, unmorable, unlessable, evermore, almost, void.

Fair enough, neighbourly love is not self-evident. Some are more fenced off than others, fenced off into their own systems of beliefs. Building fences has never been as easy as today and the simple touch of a flower can seem invasive to some. Broken fences get mended, layers upon layers, hole after hole.

And taking out the trash a couple of days and some overturned fences later, I realise, but not at once, that something has changed - the fence is gone, disappeared like thistle fluff. And my neighbour, fenceless, in a brand new Stadt Zurich Entsorgung und Recycling t-shirt, smiling.

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Commisioned text for annex14
Löwenbräukunst, Zurich