Download the Book Twisted Trees: an invitation to rethink a forest experience

*Download the book HERE . 

Reflections on the duality of human and nature; the twisting figure of the trees as an act of resistance to the homogenization of the landscape; and affective ecologies in relation to  water, are some of the themes exposed in the publication Arboles torcidos (Twisted Trees), edited by Agencia de borde and Fundación Mar Adentro. The book was recently launched at the Institute of Aesthetics of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile in Santiago, Chile.

Twisted  Trees is the result of  of an artistic research project developed since  2019 by Agencia de borde titled Bosques de fuego (Forests of fire) which continued in 2022  in the  Bosque Pehuén Residency Program in which various artists and researchers met to reflect on the tensions that arise from the separation between culture and nature in relation to a  forest. Their voices, works and reflections also created a  traveling exhibition presented at the UC Temuco Art Gallery and CENTEX in Valparaíso during 2022.

 The publication presents a tour of each of the works and reflections of the artists and researchers, who present various approaches to the forest. The video performance Tray tray ko by visual artist Seba Calfuqueo, for example, delves into the historical relationship of waters from the Mapuche worldview, as well as the connection of the human body extended in nature. Calfuqueo expresses in the book that “the work takes as its starting point the historical relationship of the waters, the force that runs in them and the implications and meanings that the Mapuche people have connected with their healing power,” as a way of showing perspectives respectful when relating to water in the face of extractive practices that prevail in the country. 

On the other hand,  ecologist José Tomás Ibarra, in his  text The wheel of memory: twisted trees towards light and community, proposes a view from socioecology on the life of trees as agents of biocultural memory. Ibarra emphasizes the active exercise of communities and territories in the construction of knowledge that activates the care and repair practices of relationships between human and more than human actors in the forest.

The publication also includes writings by the Mapuche poet María Lara Millapan, who speaks of how  “poetry is the pure manifestation of feelings, emanating from the am (inner self), the püllü (spirit) and the pewma (dreams).” Thus, her work  addresses the poetics of landscape as vehicles of direct communication with the transcendent. In this regard, the author expresses an act of denunciation of the destroyed lands of her people, where language takes the form of resistance to cultural and natural flattening.   

Likewise, Agencia de borde –made up of Sebastián Melo, María Rosario Montero and Paula Salas– carried out explorations in the old-growth  forest of Bosque Pehuen to compare this cosystem –of a temperate rainforest – with that of monocultures, specifically eucalyptus. In this way, the research initially promoted by this group opened towards a performative-visual, poetic and socio-ecological approach. In this regard, the curator and director of art and publications of Fundación Mar Adentro, Maya Errázuriz, pointed out that “one may tend to think that a twisted tree is of no use, however, this book invites us to think about what twisting means, perhaps the impulse to grow upward in search of light as a valuable form of resistance, and a forest is valuable precisely because it is not homogeneous.”

Excerpt from the Twisted Trees review : How to survive the homogenization and simplification of landscapes? This publication is an attempt to rethink the experience of being in the forest from a critical perspective through an exploration of co-habitation aesthetics that promote the flourishing of natural and cultural diversities to think about/from/and through a forest, other possible futures. When opening these pages, it seeks to derive from the polyphony of voices of Maya Errazuriz, Seba Calfuqueo, José Tomás Ibarra, María Lara Millapan and Agencia de Borde (María/Rosario Montero, Paula Salas and Sebastián Melo), who in various ways shared collectively forest experiences that were later materialized through exhibition samples under the title Crooked Trees.

• On Tuesday, March 26 at 6:00 p.m., a relaunch will take place at the Complejo Interdisciplinario para el Desarrollo Sustentable, Temuco. More information soon.