Arboreal
March 26 - June 26, 2021
/ Slash Art, San Francisco
With works by Aycoobo (Wilson Rodríguez), Bill Fontana, Helen Mirra, Delcy Morelos, Emerson Uýra, and Cecilia Vicuña.
It appears as if all forms of life, especially now, are in a race for survival. Some might think that, in order to succeed, they must surround themselves with those they most resemble to make it easier to predict and understand behaviors and their environment. Others might think it is wiser to put as much distance as possible between themselves and anyone else so as to minimize any potential drain on limited natural supplies. Many have convinced themselves that their survival depends on their ability to extract resources from nature, monetize them as assets, and strengthen themselves via wealth and power. During the past few centuries, Western theories of biological evolution, alongside economic models centered around the individual, have taught us that competition is the motor of life and that genes are selfish, leading all organisms to fight for themselves, with only the fittest surviving.
But trees teach us a different and more collaborative side of the story. The more diverse a forest is, the healthier it is, and the more closely connected its trees are, the more resilient they become. Different trees contain diverse and complementary bits of vital knowledge, and should a single species dominate or become invasive, the forest, as a whole, weakens. While this might sound like a metaphor, it’s a biological fact: life can only flourish if and when different living beings coexist alongside each other. Homogeneity and lack of inter-connectedness prevent life from thriving.
Trees also tell us how little we know about how survival actually works. They form underground networks, where carbon, fungi, and nutrients are passed from one to another. Chemical signals by one tree prepare another for danger because, together, all trees behave as a single body or organism. A forest is not just a collection of trees, but a complex society that thrives and relies on cooperation, rather than self-interest.
While the artists included are human animals, this exhibition proposes an "arboreal" way of understanding the world and invites us to rethink the relationship we have with the forests and with one another. The artists' works draw on Indigenous knowledge and experience, notions of inner sound and resonance, Buddhist pragmatism, the practice of walking, activism, and biology. While trees appear to be static, unable to move from one place to another, their bodies contain the many interconnected layers and nuances that make life possible.
On the occasion of Arboreal, Indigenous artist, biologist, and environmentalist Emerson Uýra offered The Amazon: Scenarios, Challenges, and Art Education as Pathways to the Future, a lecture co-hosted by / Slash Art and The Wattis Institute.
Special thanks to all the artists and the team at / Slash Art, especially Tuğçe Evirgen Özmen, Efe Özmen, Ana İpek Saygı, and Maxine Schoefer-Wulf.
© All texts and photos my own unless otherwise indicated.
This is one of the Instant pieces Mirra made for her exhibition 65 Instants at BAMPFA in 2003. Each of the 65 works are made with the same inexact parameters, and each measures the length of Mirra’s elbow to fingertip plus the width of her second hand. The title is borrowed from the second-century Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna and his idea about the moment between an initial perception and the rational judgment that follows. This moment, according to him, lasts an instant, of which there are 65 within the length of time of a finger snap. For Mirra, this reference is not mystical or scientific, but “a means of thinking about time and space.”
This is one of Mirra’s first small-scale woven works. The title names the colors of the yarn used in the construction, which takes the form, perhaps, of moss and lichen covered rocks.
In a large container, fertile soil, clay, cocoa powder, ground cloves, and water were mixed to form a thick, uniform, aromatic fluid that was carefully applied onto burlap.
During my childhood, I lived with my paternal grandmother of Indigenous descent. She grew and harvested almost everything that we ate in her yard. Her skin was the color of soil, the same earthy soil with which the floors and the walls of her house were made. The outdoor landscape blended with the interior of the house; there was no defined line between the inside and the outside. To prevent our house from becoming too dusty, we would moisten the soil with our hands, making circular movements until we had covered the entire surface of the floor. We performed this noble task daily, on our knees.—Excerpt from commissioned text by Delcy Morelos, 2021. Read full text here.
For Arboreal, Vicuña showed her “Sidewalk Forests,” a piece composed of four photographs, which were originally shot in medium format film in 1981. This is the first work she made when she moved to New York while exploring the city and this exhibition was the first one to show them, forty years later. Two of the photographs show different wild plants and weeds, shot close-up, growing through cracks in the concrete of sidewalks in New York City. The other two include spatial drawings the artist made with red thread held by the greenery she found while walking around the city, creating fragile and ephemeral forms that seem to float in mid-air. In one of them, she uses the thread to spell out a word, amor (love), woven through the branches of a tree whose trunk holds the engraved initials of anonymous people, possibly lovers.
When I first moved to New York, [Tribeca] was an abandoned neighborhood. Most of the streets didn’t really have street lights, and there was a lot of wilderness on the sidewalks. I called my first works in New York “Sidewalk Forests” because there were so many things growing between the cracks, and it was just these ruins and empty lots. The river was not accessible like it is now. You had to crawl underneath wires to touch the river, and I did! We would illegally sun ourselves, not on the rocks, but on huge pieces of cement! […]. [A sidewalk forest] is something that sprouts and grows of its own accord—a sort of rebellion of the seeds, a rebellion of the poems themselves.
—Excerpt from an interview with Cecilia Vicuña by Sarah Timmer Harvey for Asymptote.
In this work, Aycoobo illustrates a calendar representing a portion of Amazonian wisdom that is essential to many of the Indigenous ethnic groups that inhabit this vast rainforest in South America. It illustrates what the world was like before the arrival of evil and is divided into two seasons, winter and summer. Similar to the twelve-month year in Western culture, the calendar is divided into twelve temporalities. At the center of the circle is a red point, which represents Grandmother and Grandfather Fire, the creative spirit, the origin of everything. Moving outwards from there, the blue circle represents all of the seas and the brown ring is the edge of the world. The surrounding light blue area with illustrated fish represents major rivers such as the Amazon, the Caquetá, the Orinoco, and the Putumayo. The section of light blue without fish corresponds to July, when the rivers flood, which, for some Indigenous peoples, marks the beginning of the calendar. The month of August is considered to be the time of darkness and the emergence of evil, which threatens all living beings, particularly affecting human beings through disease. August is also when the worms appear and when trees do not yet bear fruit.
The next two large sections in the calendar represent the chagra (an Indigenous agroforestry practice and area) and mountains populated by a native forest. In the mountains, the trees bear fruits and flowers, just like in the chagra. Different crops appear in the chagra sections, corresponding to the time period in which they grow, such as corn, yuca, pineapple, tobacco, coca, banana, and tubers. Birds and insects are also included, since they pollinate the plants, and some suck the nectar of the flowers in order to sustain themselves and procreate. In the chagra, Indigenous people cultivate some plants that feed their bodies and other plants because they are considered sacred, believed to be their spiritual Grandmothers and Grandfathers. Aycoobo explains, “these plants connect people to the higher spirit” and include the manicuera (yuca juice), the chilli bush, sweet herbs (turmeric, basil and mint), coca, tobacco, and yagé (ayahuasca). The plants that feed the body are considered to be the children, among them tubers and fruits. Bacuba, the rainbow outer ring of the calendar, does not come from the refraction of sunlight in water droplets, like a traditional rainbow, but is a protector that warns of the arrival of evil, like a messenger of adversity. Finally, the dark blue that surrounds the calendar represents the universe at night and shows the different phases of the moon synchronized with all of creation.
For Mirra, the practice of walking is completely intertwined with her practice of weaving. While her woven works are not a direct record of her daily long-distance walks––as is the case in her Field Recordings series––walking is a parallel companion practice to weaving. They take place in the same mind-heart space, affecting one another. Both practices are intentional ways of spending long periods of time bringing together the body, the mind, and everything that surrounds them. May, April consists of two woven pieces: one is made in May 2017 and the other twenty-three months later, in April 2019. The piece on the left, May, was conceived “by chance,” while April, on the right, was made to be its copy. The weavings function like two siblings, almost two years apart, counter-balancing each other.
This work is inspired by the final part of the “Two Orphans” myth. The story involves two brothers, who, after disobeying, cause a great flood. Both orphans then flee to the hills and build a guarango tree to protect themselves as they wait for the flood waters to recede. In this dark period, the older brother (who manages time) hears the song of the red-beaked paujil bird (the curassow) and then another song, this time of the pava colorada (the red-faced guan), and he picks one of the fruits off the guarango tree and throws it down, making the world bloom again. At sunrise, he hears the pava negra (the black guan), and a rainbow appears, symbolizing the new time.
Ballou is composed of three pine cones Mirra found in the Grünewald forest while in residence in Berlin, and a fragment of a wooden shipping pallet, cut into its form by the artist. While a pallet is connected to systems of industrialized transportation, this sculpture brings the pallet back into relationship with the trees it was cut from. Its title refers to Hosea Ballou, an 18th Century theologian who played an important role in American Unitarian history. Mirra’s first deep encounter with the forest was at a Unitarian summer camp she attended as a child in the Adirondacks. She grew up with the Unitarians’ egalitarian and democratic values intertwined with the formative experience of being in the woods with them in play.
This work centers around one of the various kinds of chupaderos or salados that exist in the Amazon rainforest. Indigenous knowledge describes these natural drinking troughs that emerge from the rainforest’s ground as water resources exclusive to animals, as the water can cause diseases in humans. It is believed that some of these chupaderos are enchanted and that they were created for species of animals such as the tapir, the borugo, the deer, the armadillo, the cajuche (white-lipped peccary), and the cerrillos (collared peccary) to drink and bathe.
This tree is a type of fig tree that grows on the banks of a river. It is milky, large, and most birds feed on its fruits as the fruits’ nutrients protect the birds’ bodies by preventing disease. Armadillos, conga ants, and various birds make their nests in their bambas, which are the “fins” that come out of the trunks of many Amazonian trees, providing additional stability, since their roots do not grow very deep.
What we see in this work, composed of seven individual lightweight linen parts, are the rubbings of tree cuts found along a daylong walk in a forest on the edge of the city of Berlin, with 5000 steps taken in between each print being made. We see both the core rings tracing the years of the trees’ development and the rough marks left by a chainsaw at the moment of felling.
For Sequoia Trees River Echoes, Fontana mounted high resolution vibration sensors (accelerometers) onto the trunks of sequoia trees, wondering what these 3,000-year-old trees “had to say.” The sound that he found captured inside of these ancient trees, the largest on Earth, was that of the distant Kaweah River, a river that runs through the Sierra Nevada, fed by high elevation snowmelt along the Great Western Divide. The Kaweah River basin, the land of the Yokuts and Western Mono Native peoples, holds the memory of the violence caused by Spanish colonizers and American loggers in the 1800s, before the formation of the Sequoia National Park in 1890. The resonating echoes of the distant river moving through the landscape result in a sound sculpture that sonifies this flowing rhythm into the timbre of wood, reminding us of the inter-dependence of the mountains, rivers, and trees, as well as the layers of history that they have witnessed. In the words of the artist, “I find the reality of these ancient trees ‘listening’ to the earth inspiring. It is a metaphor for the future I hope the earth can have.”
Elementary Series (The Plant that Eats Itself Essay) is a photograph taken in the rainforest, inside the Amazon Museum, in Manaus. Here, Uýra engages with an intimate aspect of the forest: the way it eats itself. The Grandmother forest feeds on the decomposition of the life and biomass that she generates, a process in which even a single leaf on the ground is important to her functioning. To make this photograph, the artist placed leaves and seeds on her face and “felt the forest’s constant cycle of Death meeting Life, with nobility, in every moment.” “How many times,” Uýra wonders, “do we eat of ourselves in order to continue living? The Grandmother, by eating herself, reminds us of the power of our own internal forces, which, individually as well as in connection to other worlds, can always be renewed.”
Emerson Uýra shared stories and challenges inherent to life in the Amazon in 2021, speaking with, from, and through the forest from their home in Manaus, Brazil, an industrialized city in the middle of the rainforest in the state of Amazonas. Uýra spoke through their hybrid identity, one that interweaves Emerson Munduruku, an Indigenous artist, educator, activist, biologist, and ecologist, and Uýra Sodoma, a drag queen persona born in 2016 who embodies a “tree that walks” through performance. Uýra addresses tensions and encounters between the forest and the city, between traditional cultures and capitalist interests. Acknowledging that social, cultural, and environmental issues cut across time and space–that speaking about the Amazon is also speaking about the planet–Uýra proposes collaborative pathways for healing now and into the future.
In a meeting with Uýra in 2018, shaman Davi Kopenawa spoke of the deforestation caused by the mining in his land, the land of the Yanomami people. He said that “when the land is cleared, the Earth is naked.” At that time, the deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon was seeing record increases. The following year, with the inauguration of President Bolsonaro, whose regime presents a great threat to forests and their peoples, deforestation increased further still. In this context, Uýra began this series of images seeking to share this great tragedy with people through visual references such as the ox, the tractor, the naked soil, the chain, and the soybean. In The Last Forest Series (Naked Earth Essay), the land is not only naked (stripped of its forest) but also bleeds. By connecting the human heart to that of the touched tree, she remembers that all beating hearts inhabiting this land, even during times of great pain, have their own rhythm and their natural union allows for the great beat of life.
The Amazon rainforest, which holds 16,000 different species of trees, is slowly becoming dry. It covers some 5 million square kilometers of land across nine countries. More than half of the Amazon is located in Brazil, where more than 19% of the forest has been cleared. In the first three months of 2020, the deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon was 50% higher than in the same three-month period in 2019. Even before the pandemic, scientists warned that Bolsonaro’s development-friendly policies could transform the world’s largest rainforest into a dry, savannah-like landscape. Once this “tipping point” is crossed, this colossal ecosystem could begin emitting more greenhouse gases than it captures, effectively turning a vital tool in the fight against climate change into yet another source of harmful emissions.
Brazil’s Indigenous communities hold some of the most pristine sections of the rainforest and have long been targeted by illegal logging and mining operations. Since the pandemic began, Brazil’s environmental agency has scaled back its enforcement measures, leaving the forest and its Indigenous tribes even more vulnerable to daily deadly threats.