Bosque Pehuén Residency Program: Multidisciplinary Nature Research Station
2018 | Forest Mimesis
The French artist Etienne de France, who participated in an Art and Conservation residency in 2017 with Fundación Mar Adentro, returned to Bosque Pehuén to create a piece on the representation of the forest and its cinematic semiotics.
Artist Etienne de France wanted to further research in Bosque Pehuén to create a new work of art, hence he returned in November 2018. The preliminary title of this new piece is Forest Mimicry, alluding to the imitation of nature. “It is a project on forests and the importance of finding a contemporary representation of them amidst the political and economic situation of the Araucanía region in Chile. It will be a set of works that explores the manner of representing the forest today,” says the artist.
Forests and trees create entire universes, where multiple cycles and forms of life intertwine. “Through their own semiotics and forms of communication, these trees, animals, and minerals shape an infinite narrative of growth, life, death, as well as accounts of destruction, deforestation and multiple futures. The concept of mimicry can help us to answer the question of forest representation.” In this sense, de France believes that we could make an analogy to cinema: forests and their relation with light, shadow and growth allude to the origins of cinema in the capturing of light and movement.
