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Environment

The Forest opens today in Limassol

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The Arboreal Collective, in collaboration with the Lab for Animation Research, is presenting its first project titled The Forest at the NeMe Arts Centre in Limassol, a group exhibition that will include a seminar and workshop.

“Exploring the anatomy of selfhood,” say the organisers, “through nature and technology may at first glance seem contradictory due to a long-standing narrative within contemporary culture that often focalises on a regressive relationship between science, the natural world, and people. Taking this as a point of departure, The Forest proposes a collaborative space that reimagines this relationship via an altered, modern, more hospitable lens that invites intimate expansion through healing. Redressing imbalances on a cellular level is in some respects akin to the slow art movement philosophy,” they add, “which calls for audiences to develop a more mindful relationship with art.”

The project invited contributions from Cypriot and international artists that suggest gradual changes in these perspectives via an exhibition, educational talks, and interactive workshops. As a comparative study of people and trees, this exhibition continues to explore humanity and its complexities within the context of nature. Utilising new technologies such as artificial intelligence alongside a long-standing love of trees to create these conceptual transplantations, the project holds space for vital experiments to be made between the oldest and newest living beings.

“Recent scientific inquiry is aligning itself with a long-established belief in the sophisticated communication network,” explain the exhibition organisers, “with which trees engage to sustain and nurture each other. As social beings, they behave collectively and protectively. Trees have a language, family, sensory capacities, live in symbiosis with other species and climatic influences, and can count and remember. This vital discovery of plant intelligence could provide some answers to many of today’s environmental challenges. As a means of exploring the nurturing potential between humanity, nature and technology, this exhibition gives equal weight to all three by interweaving the narratives they convey through a primitive/scientific discourse that comes at a crucial time in which we all need saving.”

The workshop on Saturday titled We, Trees is a two-part guided session inside one of the artist’s (Nina Sumarac’s) digital forest installed in the gallery space. It will begin at 11am with a meditation practice led by the performance artist Elena Gavriel, followed by a drawing session with Sumarac herself. This workshop is an extension of the exhibition’s aim to encourage people to re-engage with nature through practices that inspire reflection, imagination and channelling, modelled on the life of trees.

A day after the exhibition ends, on March 12, the Climate Change and Forests seminar will take place between 11am and 1pm. Dr Milto Miltiadou from Tepak and Natasa Ioannou from Friends of the Earth Cyprus will present the current research to the public conducted as part of the Astarte project since 2021. Until then, NeMe Arts Space in old Limassol invites the public to explore the nature of The Forest.

 

The Forest

Group exhibition. February 25-March 11. We, Trees workshop. 11am-1pm. March 12. Climate Change and Forests seminar. 11am-1pm. NeMe Arts Space, Limassol. Exhibition opening times:  Tuesday-Friday: 5.30pm-8.30pm. Saturday: 10am-1pm. www.neme.org

 

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