On-living | Text by Luiz Alberto Oliveira

There is a particular moment as you sail out to sea, when land fades as the dominant presence, when ocean, sky and winds enclose the seafarer completely – and everything is different. Something similar happens to mountaineers when they sight the summit and with astronauts when the rockets’ roar falls quiet – and, of course, when you enter a forest.

Forest is a condensation of all living, all life. Innumerable dimensions, simultaneous, redoubled possibilities for action, movement and deflection, are embodied in the profusion of beings, perpetually mingling in disparate harmony. Forest is language, a thousand tongues murmuring, a thousand shadows glistening. Few infinites are given to us so whole, so multiple, so intimately alien. Forest takes everything, because it is in the deep more-than-everything. Being there is to become something, some other; the unconscious is structured like a forest. The Amazon is Brazil’s unconscious.

            

Above all, the forest is complex – countless components, in myriad mutual relationships, ordered and counterpoised at so many levels. Being complex is to fold, inwards and outwards. The American ocean of chlorophyll connects with the African ocean of silica as it crosses the waters of the Atlantic. Dust grains from the Sahara carried by Trade winds seed Amazon rainclouds. Evaporation from the forest recycles that moisture, forming aerial rivers that will disgorge into springs and basins in the Southeast. In that way, the cataracts at Iguassu are fed by desert – evidence of the global interconnection of complex system Earth. Even more remarkable though, is to realise that the forest’s transpiration is its respiration: the forest produces the rain that produces it.

This is the context in which to situate human action in and on the forest. For millennia, the original peoples occupied and modified the forest, integrating bodily with it, fertilising it with indigenous black soil and seeding it with Brazil nut trees along a diagonal southeast-northwest strip running thousands of kilometres. However, since the Anthropocene (the epoch when overall human activity became planetary in force and scope) dawned little more than sixty years ago, one third of forest area has been destroyed or altered. The mild, millennial indigenous presence contrasts brutally with the voracious impact of capitalism. And it is here that the question of survival arises – for the forest, the indigenous peoples, for Brazil – and will not be deflected.

The meticulous poetry of Patricia Gouvêa’s images designates precisely that unbounded horizon. Forest re-assimilates ruined house, as it should, leaving its marks and restoring mossy skin, emerging miraculous from the motionless mouth of some out-of-place piping. Man gives it a name, a centre – all it has no need of. Human artefact-time drowns in the vast cycle of soil roots trunks and leaves, but beware: if the forest lives off itself, non-linear as the meanders of an Amazon backwater, without itself it will become extinct – as will we.

            

On-living is on us.

Luiz Alberto Oliveira (physicist and General-Curator of Museum of Tomorrow)