The Sound of the Falling Tree:
Exhibition
Exhibition
Authorship
Colectivo Agencia de Borde
Curatorship
Gabriela Urrutia
Type
Exhibition Solo
Location
Galería Barrios Bajos, Valdivia, Chile.
Date
January, 2020
What place does the eucalyptus occupy today in the experience of the landscape in Chile?
Between regions IV and X, more than one million hectares are covered by eucalyptus plantations (INFOR 2018). They form a biological mass that is hard to describe as natural, but rather as the result of an industrial, technified process that maximises private profits.
The ‘eucalyptus as a landscape’ phenomenon allows us to reflect on the nature/technology boundary, distinguishing the natural effects of the species from those resulting from the productive operations applied to the eucalyptus.
In this exhibition, we propose to re-experience the eucalyptus made invisible by the plantation. This is at the crossing of memory, daily affections, and the individual tree that expresses its identity and particularities.
The collective worked with four types of registers. The first is a video portraying the eucalyptus monocultures of Chaihuin Island as a new technified landscape, which transforms the roadside plantations into a cinematic backdrop. The video’s movement directs the gaze toward these plantations.
The second strategy is the resignification of a collection of postcards of Chile in which eucalyptus appears, from the photographic archive of the National Library. These are historical records that once built our country’s image. In postcards of Plaza Sotomayor in Valparaíso, Cerro Santa Lucía, and views of the cities of Talcahuano and Puerto Montt, among many others, the eucalyptus has been an unnoticed part of the Chilean landscape since the beginning of the century.
A third strategy came from a field trip with local artists, who, at the collective’s invitation, made visual observations of monocultures on paper.
Finally, a young eucalyptus tree (uprooted from the roadside) hangs in the middle of the room.
The exhibition operates as a site-specific installation in which the different registers make up the work.
Between regions IV and X, more than one million hectares are covered by eucalyptus plantations (INFOR 2018). They form a biological mass that is hard to describe as natural, but rather as the result of an industrial, technified process that maximises private profits.
The ‘eucalyptus as a landscape’ phenomenon allows us to reflect on the nature/technology boundary, distinguishing the natural effects of the species from those resulting from the productive operations applied to the eucalyptus.
In this exhibition, we propose to re-experience the eucalyptus made invisible by the plantation. This is at the crossing of memory, daily affections, and the individual tree that expresses its identity and particularities.
The collective worked with four types of registers. The first is a video portraying the eucalyptus monocultures of Chaihuin Island as a new technified landscape, which transforms the roadside plantations into a cinematic backdrop. The video’s movement directs the gaze toward these plantations.
The second strategy is the resignification of a collection of postcards of Chile in which eucalyptus appears, from the photographic archive of the National Library. These are historical records that once built our country’s image. In postcards of Plaza Sotomayor in Valparaíso, Cerro Santa Lucía, and views of the cities of Talcahuano and Puerto Montt, among many others, the eucalyptus has been an unnoticed part of the Chilean landscape since the beginning of the century.
A third strategy came from a field trip with local artists, who, at the collective’s invitation, made visual observations of monocultures on paper.
Finally, a young eucalyptus tree (uprooted from the roadside) hangs in the middle of the room.
The exhibition operates as a site-specific installation in which the different registers make up the work.
Linked projects
Publications
Residencies
We carried out fieldwork in Bosque Pehuén, a conservation reserve belonging to the Mar Adentro Foundation. In January 2022, we spent two weeks with our families and the artist Sebastián Calfuqueo working in the recovered forests of the Mar Adentro Foundation. During the residency, we carried out different actions that aimed to make visible the relationships between the species and the temporalities that co-exist there. We arrived at the Pehuén Forest longing to be affected by the infinite relationships that underpin notions of landscape. We wanted to inhabit and understand the forest beyond the camera’s mediated gaze. We wanted to smell, touch, get dirty… turn into a forest. Feel and think through the experience of being IN that territory. We devised different strategies to be in the forest and think of it not as taxonomies of species and experiences, but as connecting relationships. In this process, and following some ideas put forward by Tomás Ibarra (2020), we set out to go, touch and link the elements that contained the memory, encountering the stumps along the way. These are tree trunks that were cut down, burned, or simply fell, speaking to a time when this place was a productive site of native timber extraction. They also remind us of and make visible a much longer and imperceptible history. Understanding these remnants of trees as reservoirs of memory and new life, places where ecosystems reproduce again and where new trees are born and take up residence, means that the boundaries between the living and the inert are blurred. The interdependence of organisms and the becoming of a deep time are expressed very clearly. We created a series of stoneware ceramic pieces in which the textures of the stumps are imprinted by contact between the trunk and the paste. The shapes engraved in the ceramics emerged as rapidly as the rest of the forest. At the same time, we plotted a grid of points along our routes through the forest by recording our geolocation as we marked the stumps. Thus, we recorded the dead/living trees in photography, video, geolocation and stoneware. The experience in Bosque Pehuén opened a new dimension of what we had been investigating in Bosque de Fuego, as we found another forest within the forest, formed by the remains of trees that, in turn, build an internal network in the ecosystem. We discovered a forest within the forest, and that was a find we were not looking for.
Bosque Pehuén, Araucanía andina, Chile
17 al 31 January 2022
Outreach and mediation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvyiDxyUE90&t=125s
Support and funding
Support from the artistic creation fund of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
Collaborated in this exhibition:
Gaspar Sepúlveda
Tomás Molina
Valentina Inostroza
César Scotti
Javiera Muñoz
Joaquín Cociña
Gabriela Urrutia