Corals
by Natalie Häusler

“‘Sex,’ writes Berlin based artist and poet Natalie Häusler in her book-length poem Corals, ‘is the ecology of the poem.’ Or put differently, a poem can only exist in the relationships between bodies – in the eroticism of being-together that is continually formed and transformed through language […] The poem itself plays with its homophone ‘choral,’ ebbing and flowing in various directions, using saturated imagery and linguistic shifts.” (Matthew Rana)

Corals is a physical environment as well as a multilingual poem (English, German, French) written over a period of one-and-a-half years. Initially, the poem is situated in and around the sea. The underwater world gradually collapses and merges at times with virtual reality. Corals is an attempt to create a poem that acts like a living organism. “A poem might be worthless outside its limited readership, an abject and fragile ornament. But as Häusler suggests, ‘it wants to be warm, to be felt, to be plastic, to be recycled and rejected.’ It also ‘wants to be / graveyard.’ But not to annihilate itself. The poem wants to remember.” (Matthew Rana)

The publication, as well as the environment Corals, is part of the exhibition ‚To Each Concrete Man – Natalie Häusler & Ree Morton‘ at Kunstmuseum Bochum, taking place from October 12th, 2024, to February 23rd, 2025. The exhibition is an encounter between the oeuvres of the two artists with a focus on the entanglement of language and art, the role of friendship and the environment as an art form.