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Archive: Forest Times

 
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Uriel Orlow — Unsere Zukunft von Pflanzen lernen | J. Emil Sennewald |Nov. 2024

Aktuell wird Uriel Orlow im Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst und im MCBA Lausanne gezeigt. Während er in Zürich für ‹Knowledge Is a Garden› Sammlungswerke mit eigenen kombiniert, zeigt er in Lausanne neben seinem neuesten Film erstmals Steinskulpturen. Im Gespräch gibt er Einblick in seine Kunstpraxis mit Pflanzen und deren Kulturgeschichte.

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Uriel Orlow is currently being shown at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst and the MCBA Lausanne. While in Zurich he is combining collection works with his own for ‘Knowledge Is a Garden’, in Lausanne he is showing stone sculptures alongside his latest film for the first time. In conversation, he gives an insight into his art practice with plants and their cultural history.

Read the full article here.

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Forest Times

Forest Times brings together two major recent projects by artist Uriel Orlow, Reading Wood (Backwards), 2022, and Forest Futurism, 2024, in which plants are simultaneously political actors, witnesses to the past and guides for the future. With Reading Wood (Backwards), Orlow turns his attention to the entanglements of human and non-human actors in order to read the archive against the grain, asking what would restituting to the natural world mean, while with Forest Futurism, it is the life of plants themselves, outside or beyond the time of human history, that takes center stage. Working across film and 3D modelling, the latter project connects the palaeontological deep time of tree fossils with future forest modelling to imagine, with the voice of children, more-than-human scenarios from the point of view of trees. Set in South Tyrol/Alto Adige and conducted in dialogue with a palaeobotanist and climate scientists, the project forges connections between local scientific research and global climate concerns and the urgent need for alternative visions of the future.

Uriel Orlow. Forest Times. With essays by Lucia Pietroiusti and Ana Teixeira Pinto, and an introduction by Nicole Schweizer, curator of contemporary art at MCBA. Design by In the Shade of a Tree, Paris.

More information can be found at K. Verlag

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Forest Futurism

Forest Futurism visits ancient forest ecosystems from the earth’s past, imagines future forests in the face of changing climate and considers the forest as a multi-species school, where children learn co-existence and more-than-human, non extractive ways of being.

Forest fossils not only provide a window into the distant past, allowing us to see what forests looked like millions of years ago and how trees have adapted to survive in challenging environmental conditions, including changing temperatures or drier conditions – but they can also give as an indication of how plants might react to the current changing climate. Similarly, looking at changes in the forest canopy can be a tool for understanding forest ecosystems and predicting how they will respond to future climate stresses. Working across film, photography, drawing, and sculpture from 3D scans of fossil, the project connects the paleontological deep time of tree fossils with future forest modeling to imagine more-than-human scenarios from the point of view of the forest. The main protagonists of the central film We have already lived through the future we just can’t rememeber it are children who move through the seasons in an intimate kinship with the forest, living and learning in tune with the silvestral environment and helping us imagine a different future based on more-than-human planetary co-existence.

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Une Clameur | ed. bermuda | 2024

Catalogue published on the occasion of the group exhibition Une Clameur at the Château de Voltaire & Fort l’Écluse, an initiative of Pays de Gex agglo, curated by Max Bondu, Bénédicte le Pimpec and Guillaume Robert, with works by Atelier Paysan, Max Bondu, Mathilde Chénin, Félicien Goguey, Salômé Guillemin, LB Plantes, Faire argile, Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet, Lou Masduraud, Krishna May, Dominique Petitgand, Marie Preston, Delphine Reist, Jean-Xavier Renaud, Simon Ripoll-Hurier, Pascal Rivet, Guillaume Robert, Maud Soudain, Célia Picard & Hannes Schreckensberger.

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Forest Essentials Take Two

The starting point of this series of works is a wood library in Lisbon, founded at the beginning of the 20th century. These so-called xylariums were already established in Europe from the end of the 18th century for the study, documentation and classification of wood species. They can be understood in the light of the Enlightenment and taxonomy, as well as embody the importance of wood as a natural resource, whether as fuel, building material or – in the context of a colonial power like Portugal – for the construction of ships.
Based on representations of the tree species Daniellia oliveri, which originates from Guinea-Bissau, Forest Essentials Take Two / Close-Up (Bóbe) reproduces microscopic images of the wood fibres as a wood print on paper, while Forest Essentials Take Two / Long Shot (Bóbe) shows a silkscreen on beech wood combining archive photographs of dense Daniellia oliveri vegetation and an isolated tree. The tree species reflects the holdings of the Lisbon Wood Library, which were mainly expanded between the 1940s and 1960s through expeditions to Portugal’s African colonies and were accordingly used for research into exotic tree species. From the forest to the wooden board and from the fibre structure to the paper, the work counterpart accomplishes a multi-layered shift from the large to the small, from the material to the useful, from the historical archive to the contemporary print.

Forest Essentials Take Two / Close-Up (Bóbe), 2022
Wood cut on Japanese paper, 46 x 62 cm, produced by: Hugo Amorim

Forest Essentials Take Two / Long Shot (Bóbe), 2022
Silkscreen print on wood, 46 x 62 cm, produced by: Telmo Chaparra

Forest Essentials Take Two (Sobreiro), 2022
wood cut on watercolour paper and silkscreen print on wood, 42 x 66cm, 2022

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Reading Wood (Backwards)

According to Jason Moore, modern capitalist economies, and their boom and bust cycles, were arguably born on the island of Madeira (the Portuguese word for wood). In the first decades of the 1400’s Portuguese settlers began to fell the forests leading to its rapid deforestation, and consequent exhaustion. As timber harvesting gave way to sugar crops, enslaved Africans were brought to work in the island’s plantation system. But as Madeira ran out of wood, labour productivity collapsed too, with sugar production peaking in 1506, then suffering an astonishingly rapid fall by 1525. Uriel Orlow’s project “Reading Wood” explores the historical continuum that ties colonial expansion to the contemporary neo-colonial practices of the timber industry, as well as the legacies of bioprospecting missions, botanical expeditions and the collecting of plant samples.Taking as its starting point the concept of wood library (Xylariums) the artist dives into the Xyloteca of Palacio Calheta located in the former Colonial Garden in Lisbon (now renamed Tropical Botanical Garden), to ask “What happens when the forest becomes a library, serving Western knowledge systems and economies of extraction?”
Well into the 1970’s —long after all other European countries had forfeited their colonies— the Xyloteca oversaw botanical expeditions to the Portuguese overseas colonies in Africa. Concerned with the attritional lethality that takes place gradually and often invisibly, Orlow turns his attention to the entanglements of human and non-human actors in order to read the archive against the grain, asking what would restituting of the natural world means.
(Ana Teixeira Pinto)

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Dedication

Dedication is a 5-screen video installation accompanied by a series of sculptures integrated into the floor. It is a paean to ancient cross-species collaborative association between plants and fungi at the roots of most plants. Mycorrhizae are usually invisible, underground root systems that form an intricate web of exchange of nutrients and allow trees to communicate with each other.

The symbiotic root systems of plants with fungi are the basis of life on the planet but are often overlooked. The complex symbiotic root systems allow for social, cooperatively functioning systems and communication between trees underground. Like a superorganism, they exchange nutrients and water, or warn each other of pests and communicate vulnerabilities in a communal exchange.

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