The installation Traurige ­Tropen (Tristes Tropiques) is made up of numerous discrete objects, some green in color and each bearing the epithet “palm.” Palm trees, those symbols of ­paradise, here manifest as arrangements of everyday objects bereft of their utilitarian functions. The mere attribution of palm-­being, to which actually any random everyday object could be subjected, begets a gracefulness about the combinatorics of materials and formal similarity to real palms: a green travel bag attached to a stick turns into a Travel Palm, while several seat cushions on a staff form its counterpart, the Seat Palm; garden hoses, wine bottles and hammers make up a Drunken Brawl Palm. Other titles include the Techno Palm, the Block Palm, the Stone Palm, the Plinth Palm, Light Palms, Military Hare Palm, Mother-and-Child Palm, Clean Palm, World Palm, Arty-­Farty Palm, Minimal Palm, Instant Palm, Disposable Palm, Beuys Palm, Franz Erhard Walter Palm, and Reyle Palm … The palms become metaphors for more or less existential aspects of life: desire, travel, sitting (as well as in “being left on the shelf”), brawling (fight), stone (construction), also for fashionable necessities, assertions, and for successful growth in the forest of the arts. Their classification is not botanical but rather a comical inversion of some “scientific” taxonomy. The title Traurige Tropen (Tristes Tropics) refers to the eponymous book by ethnologist Claude Lévi- Strauss. In the final chapter, following a thorough analysis of Amazonian societies, he talks of the futility of attempts at one-­ dimensional explanation, and of that eternal question mark above and inside people’s heads. As symbols of fulfillment, the palms call paradise in question. Paradise, in fact, is slogging, brawling, traveling, sitting, boozing: a secular routine that may be—once recognized as pointless—met with humor if you yourself become a palm, traveling, boozing, sitting, in the state of highest fulfillment, and laughing at yourself. ☐ Uwe Carlson