Linde von Braun

Tomáš Braun (*1981) is a high school teacher, musician, composer, translator and artist. He was born in Děčín, North Bohemia. He studied English Language and Literature at the Faculty of Arts of the Jagiellonian University. He started to study art relatively recently, thanks to Hurricane Eberhard, which devastated the Lusatian Mountains in the Šluknov region in the spring of 2019. It also felled a two-hundred-year-old linden tree, the tree of his childhood and adolescence.Its wood is gradually being used to create sculptures, objects and paintings, and the artist is trying to preserve at least part of the tree's history, which, given its estimated age, goes back in time to the end of the eighteenth century. In this context, each piece is a unique statement whose origins can be sought in a shared historical subconscious. On a personal level, the artist perceives the fallen tree as an integral backdrop to his childhood. In the wood of which he unwittingly finds under his hands early memories of events, impressions or faces he has long forgotten, but also through it he feels, as if mediated, the presence of loved ones who died before he could recognize them. In a broader sense, one can also perceive the fate of more than ten human generations in one cottage with a linden tree within reach, standing in the foothills of the Lusatian Mountains.Die Linde von BraunThe road turns into a journey. At the end, near the border, the road disappears into the grass. Beyond that, there are only bollards in a ditch and a meadow stretching upwards towards the forest. Dolní Podluží, Niedergrund, U Hranice, description number one hundred and thirty-two. A dilapidated building perhaps a quarter of a millennium old. A house whose existence was confirmed by a small linden tree, which he proudly planted in the ground just behind his cottage, where he also fathered a child. You open the door, there she is, five men couldn't hug her. Over two and a half hundred cycles of hatching, osmosis, budding and freezing. More and more cycles. A cottage she outgrew, an inanimate shell, a thing. And likewise, the things inside lose their essence without the people they belong to. They are long gone, displaced and dead, their holdings in the grass where houses once stood. Die Linde. The one that was here with them and eventually outlived them all. They all belong to her now. On the tenth of March, two nineteen, Hurricane Eberhard swept through the Lusatian Mountains. On the night of the eleventh, at three in the morning, a thirty-meter monument could not withstand the attack of the wind and collapsed between two buildings (the roots with the dirt exhaled to the west, the tops of the leaves lay to the east) into the apple trees. Neither was harmed. Poor Linde von Braun...remembers me too, as well as the existence of every man who has breakfasted, worked, rested, rejoiced, wept, been loved or shot in her shadow. Our lives - dreams, desires, demons, idols and words - are enchanted in each of her pieces. Our faces lurk in the twisted lines, in the blackened, gnawed stumps of broken branches.