VA - Therapy Flowers (2020)

The Deutsche Depressionshilfe states that every fifth German citizen falls ill with a depression once in a lifetime. According to an estimate of the World Health Organization, depression or affective disorders will be the second most common widespread disease worldwide this year.
However, therapeutic measures are still not fully accessible in many countries - including Germany - and the lack of therapy places is just as much a reason for this as the social stigmatization associated with mental disorders.

With Therapy Flowers, the Cologne-based literary scholar and art historian Michaela Predeick provides a photographic artifact of psychotherapy. In this volume she collects 60 photographs of bouquets and flower arrangements taken in the waiting room of a psychotherapeutic practice in Cologne. The number of pictures is not arbitrary but results from the number of sessions that the statutory health insurance companies grants for initial applications for long-term therapy for behavioral therapies. Within this contingent of hours, work is done to improve the mental health of the patients and thus to increase their quality of life. Predeick's photographs, meanwhile, focus on a seemingly minor aspect of the weekly therapy visit: the design of the waiting area of the practice. Each conversation with the therapist is preceded by a short and "wordless encounter" with a fresh bouquet of flowers, which she captures in a photographic picture.

From the introduction:
"The ever new friendly shining flowers suggest that with every visit a further step on the way to healing is taken. This is in contrast to the dying of cut flowers between two sessions. The well-being of the flower and the patient proves often as a fugitive commodity.

Semantically speaking, flowers are the ultimate metaphor. They are highly communicative. Embedded in the framework of the psychotherapeutic practice, they function as a consoling gesture for the sick, who stream in and out; ironically turned around, they stand for the colorful bouquet of problems with which one strikes up with the therapist".

Therapy Flowers Compilation
The photographs are accompanied by a soundtrack compiled by the Kame House label in the form of an enclosed CD with twelve tracks that illuminate various aspects of the interrelation between flowers, photos and psychotherapeutic measures. This will be supplemented in an Extended Digital version by eleven further titles.

The collected tracks come from renowned international artists of electronic listening, ambient and computer music, including Greek producer Anatolian Weapons (Beats in Space, among others), Austrian artist Conny Frischauf and Hamburg-based musician Museum Of No Art, who is currently successful on the Canadian label Seance Center.

The musical spectrum here ranges from abstract listening to the literal floral music of the Munich-based composer and artist Emanuel "Mooner" Günther, who translates the nocturnal activities of a small apple tree into sounds.

The book will be published as a cooperation of Michaela Predeick, the Cologne publisher StrzeleckiBooks and the label Kame House on October 10, 2020, World Mental Health Day.