I met Leon Filter nearly three years ago. An art student from Germany, he was interested in tree bending, which used to be practiced in the Motovun forest along the Mirna, mostly for shipbuilding. The ancient art struck me as inherently practical, for it could find many uses in the future, as well. He wrote to me earlier this year to tell me about a book on tree bending he was preparing. He also asked me for a permission to publish a transcript of our conversation and a photograph of mine. To round it off, he promised to send me the book as soon as it got printed. And I found it in this morning’s mail.[1] Bending is its title in English. Slightly larger than a passport, it sports a few more than one-hundred and thirty pages containing text, most of which is in German and some of which is handwritten, diagrams and drawings, and photographs. There is no color in it. It did not take me long to find my piece from the Residua about our meeting (‘In Praise of Leon Filter,” September 21, 2011).[2] It is followed by a transcript of our conversation in English.[3] My photograph also appears among these pages.[4] Delighted by the feel of the book, I browsed through it for a long time. There are many interesting things in it, no doubt, but one thing that strikes me as missing is the practical bit, which attracted me from the start. For some reason, I expected to find many examples of trees that Leon Filter had bent himself over the last three years. I even envisioned spirals, helices, meanders… Come to think of it, perhaps this is what he will present in his next and much bigger book on the subject of bending.

Footnotes

1. Filter, L., Biegen, Berlin: August Verlag.

2. Op. cit., p. 49.

3. Op. cit., pp. 50-55.

4. Op. cit., p. 52.