A road
A winding tendril

Words inscribe, characters
impress the ground
Tongues taste the earth
and utter fruit

Breath carves and sweeps through
stone orifices
Saliva dissolves soft
mountains to dust

A vine
A curling tongue

Fermented words release
odors and orders
Ripe language and
grapes fomenting

Skin and excretions
circumscribe soul
Soil wrapped by throats,
membrane mucosa

A switchback
A twitching tongue back

Leaves, hooves syncopate to
the organ under foot
Proud ferrous substrate
felts polyrhythms

Glyphs crawl and scrawl over
ambivalent flux
History reddened with
wine and blood

A string
An alphabet weaving

Fecund terra firma forms
habit and land while
diesel–internet chains
drive meaning

Turquoise currents golden
wooly metaphors
for cycles and lines of
rust, lingering
 
 
 
 

Benjamin T. Busch (*1987, Kansas City) is an American visual artist and architect living in Berlin. Spanning art, architecture, curating, and writing, his work deals with the aesthetics/politics of space. His ongoing research considers spatial practice through processes of urbanization, self-organization, and the everyday, with regard to the growing role of computation across societies. Since spring 2018, Busch co-directs The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER) together with Lorenzo Sandoval. From 2012 to 2015, he co-directed the Berlin project space Staycation Museum. Busch works as a writer and translator, architectural consultant, and freelance photographer (dokugram). He authored Palimpsest and Material Senescence (2014), and together with Evangelos Papamatthäou-Matschke Point Blank (Munich: Reflektor M, 2016). Busch’s artwork and writing have appeared in Archinect, ArtSlant, Avant.org, Berlin Art Link, Failed Architecture, Horizonte (Bauhaus), Making & Breaking, and uncube. He co-edited OnCurating no. 31 (2016), and with TIER he has co-edited multiple publications.

studiobusch

Volume 3, No. 1 February 2020