Uriel Orlow is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice is research-based and process-oriented. For almost ten years, plants have been a regular focus of his work, both witnesses to and protagonists of specific histories that they enable us to uncover or interpret differently, whether it be the blind spots of our colonial heritage, or our relationship to the natural world.
For his show, Orlow presents Forest Futurism, the result of a research the artists initiated in the Italian Alps in the Merano region. The project was realised as part of the residency programme of BAU, an institute dedicated to contemporary art and ecology that invites artists to come up with works in response to the particular situation of the rural zone of Southern Tyrol. Orlow’s project explores the long time periods of climate change. The artist worked with a palaeobotanist and climate scientists who produce forest cover modelling, as well as with children enrolled in a forest kindergarten programme, to explore our connections with the more-than-human world and imagine new forms of coexistence with nature.
As Orlow explains, “The project I developed started really with a particular site where there are fossilised trees or parts of trees from 280 million years ago. What’s interesting with this place is that it emerged after an ice-age and the forest was there during a time of climate-change, where the climate was warming. So in a sense we can see in the past what might happen in the future, when the climate is warming as it is now, and is getting dryer. I was interested in think- ing about the deep past, and what it can teach us about the future.”
The research carried out by the artist is reflected in the film shown here, We Have Already Lived Through Our Future–We Just Don’t Remember It (2024), which is the result of months of filming over several seasons. Asked about the importance of the medium of film to his work, Orlow noted that “what interests me in the moving image is that it inscribes our gaze into a time span—it’s about a sustained gaze at something. But it’s about telling stories too, whether that’s just with pictures and sound, or with language.” And so the film shifts between factual visual documentation and staged scenes where children are the protagonists. On voice-over we hear children recounting in precise terms events linked to climate change over time whilst on screen the pupils of the Birkenwald forest kindergarten experience and give voice to the forest, imagine and sing it, describing it in its own evolution and connection with humans and animals. These children, future players in our relationship with nature, are located in the present, at the fold between the immensely long time span that precedes them and the possibilities of time in the making.
The artist’s research yields another result. Orlow presents here a series of sculptures to lend a material presence to the object-token that fossilised trees are, those “vehicles to travel through time,” as he puts it. The sculptures done in volcanic stone are 3D impressions of fossilised trees. They incorporate then both the trace of time that trees bear and the present of the site’s geology.
Finally, looking to the future, a Manifesto that visitors are invited to consult and take with them invites us to imagine a future inspired by lessons that trees can offer us—“The forest invites us to notice, to listen, to be.”
at Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne
until January 5, 2024