Palm Tree Studies might at first glance be a book about the somewhat counterintuitive presence of palm trees in the sanatorium-city of Merano in South Tyrol; but at a second glance, it is rather an artistic exploration into the exoticism of 19th century Europe, where the palm trees were part of the collective imaginary. With a mixture of thorough research and abstraction, Buhl presents us with a work that is at the same time cultural biography, landscape architecture, and botany – reworked through interviews, photograms by the artist, and found material into a phantasmagorical gesammtkunstwerk that illuminates the symbolic dimensions of the ‘Trachycarpus fortunei’.

Published by Humboldt Books, 2016

48 pages

Stable bound paperback