Leonard Peters

When Leonard visited the Akademie der Künste for the first time, a tree next to the building caught his attention. Fenced off by a stone wall from the rest of the street, he couldn’t forget about it. Over the next few evenings, he came back. A fox sniffled around for fries left on the pavement. A squirrel jumped between branches. Cars rushed past, pedestrians hurried along the sidewalk. The S-Bahn hummed in the distance, sirens wailed and faded. The first time that Anna and Leonard met, he told her about the tree. She became curious, and they agreed to meet there, under its branches. They took off their shoes and walked along the roots. Anna said she grew up in the Swedish forests and felt home near trees. Their presence offers her space to rest, to think clearly and finally get bored. Leonard said he loves trees, but where he’s from in the Netherlands, nature often feels controlled and distant, shaped by dikes, roads and planning. Anna and Leonard tried to imagine the tree’s history. Trees generally have been longer around than us. It’s likely that another tree once stood where the Akademie der Künste was built in the late 50s. By making this work, Leonard and Anna want to honour this one tree, but meanwhile invite you to notice the trees present in our lives.

Maybe the early roots of a new friendship between two strangers began to grow beneath this Berlin tree. As time passed, they stood silently, sometimes speaking, simply observing. They started listening together to the wind, footsteps, scraps of conversations, the humming of traffic. The tree offered them a space where attention became a shared presence. Making this piece became a continuation of those moments; a conversation in film and sound. Anna and Leonard noticed a small metal sign on the bark. They wondered what the tree might feel. The tremble of traffic in its trunk? What the tree might hear. The rain on its leaves?