Mediums
Fallen Beech tree: 00744 — Fagus Sylvatica
Clay
Photography
Audio
Film
Text
Light
Partners
Leeds 2023
Embassy of Brazil in London and Instituto Guimarães Rosa
National Lottery Heritage Fund
Yorkshire Sculpture Park
FOR EST / PRO TEST by Jenni Laiti 53.79044- 1.31892 Lotherton Park Farm 36.59 acres, Vacant 25 years, Planned future -Will be sold
53.7949214 - 1.56665079 Concrete area 8845m2, Planned future - residential/retail
This is a Forest is made by Invisible Flock in collaboration with Anushka Athique, Vandria Borari, Nwando Ebizie, María Faciolince Martina, Outi Pieski, Jenni Laiti, Matt Taylor, Daniel Voskoboynik and a fallen Beech tree: 00744 — Fagus Sylvatica.
As temperatures rise and cities become more heat stressed spaces, why can’t these lands be considered forests? This is a Forest is an exhibition and land based intervention exploring land rights, rights of nature, ownership of earth, soil, air and water questioning the systems and ideologies in which land is valued.
Exhibition
No Economic Value to the public
Invisible Flock
Film featuring 50 sites in Leeds that have the potential to be forests, including 8mm, 4k digital and 4k drone formats.
I value the small shrubs breaking through the concrete. I value the grasses and the lichens. I value the Bee, Bombus pascorum and Hoverfly, Eristalis horticola, pollinating in the so called weeds. I value the Long Tailed Tit, Robin and Black Cap flying close by. I value the top soil that was removed, and the soil, mycelium and microorganisms that will take 500 years to recover. I value the air as it is now. And the Sycamore, Ash and Birch. I value the Kestrel that was in the sky that day. I value the diversity and the colours. I value the sounds, the ones I can perceive and the ones I can't. I value that I can experience this. And I will value it when it is gone.
Lament
Invisible Flock
A Lament is a sculptural sound installation created from multiple elements of a single 150 year old beech tree 00744 - Fagus sylvatica that fell in spring 2023 after becoming infected with Meripilus giganteus, a fungus that causes white rot and decay of the lateral roots.
20 individual beech nuts were collected from this tree, scanned and carved to create large scale replicas from wood salvaged from the tree. Using 3D scanning and CNC milling the sculptures are intricately precise and are up to half a metre in diameter.
The beech nuts cradle a custom resonator sculpted in glass. Each resonator filters and amplifies a unique frequency in nature, ranging from optimal plant growth to bees swarming.
Howl
Invisible Flock
Howl is an immersive sound and light installation created from 150 year old beech tree 00744 - Fagus sylvatica that fell in spring 2023.
An almost pitch black installation the work invites time spent in the dark - letting other senses develop and sight eventually adjust to the presence of an enormous upended tree.
When I look at how we get stuck over climate change, the dead ends and desperate manoeuvres, the outbreaks of bleak certainty or shiny groundless optimism, I can't help thinking there is a connection to this culturally distinctive difficulty in facing the thought of death. We swerve these black holes rather than look at them directly; as if anything were better than slowing down, sitting with the darkness and allowing our eyes to adjust. - Dougald Hine from at Work In the Ruins
Habitat Survey
Invisible Flock
A environmental habitat survey of Ex Matthew Murray site, 16.44 acres, owned by Leeds City Council and vacant for 19 years. Planned to be cleared to become a new sports centre, this study was produced to document the life present on the site before clearing and advocate for its preservation.
Study printed on paper made from 150 year old beech tree 00744 - Fagus sylvatica that fell in spring 2023.
Yupirungáwa
Vandria Borari
Yupirungáwa, which means ‘origin’ in the Indigenous language Nheengatu, reveals the unity of local populations with the ‘Kaa’ – the forest. Through this word, the abundant biological diversity of fruit plants, medicinal plants, and palm trees found in Indigenous territories are revealed as intertwined with the path and footsteps of these populations, highlighting their agency in both the shaping and maintenance of the forest as it exists today.
The work features tucumâ and curuá seeds in ceramic, sculpted in large scale to transport us to the botanical remains found during excavations in the archaeological sites of Porto Santarém, in the town of Santarém, and of Caverna da Pedra Pintada, in Monte Alegre, both in the state of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon region. These archaeological sites are areas of terra preta – long standing occupation sites whose earth contains high levels of nutrients, organic matter and traces of ceramics, lithic, botanicals and fauna.
Last to Bloom First to Fruit
Nwando Ebizie
Last to Bloom First to Fruit is a speculative fiction, inspired by the proposed Forest site - Ex-Matthew Murray, situated in an alternative reality.
The work contains a series of artifacts collected by an imagined anthropologist/curator taken from the rites of the Murriee rituals. In this alternate reality, annual spring harvesting rituals are performed by those living in the land around the Ex-Matthew Murray site from 2023 - c2050s who lived, learned and grew alongside the Forest. Watched it bloom and grow. Developed understandings of how to live symbiotically. Amongst those understandings, they developed myths and rituals. And of those myths and rituals, we focus on the Murriee rituals - the central veneration rituals of the Mother Cherry Tree.
Ovdavázzit – Forewalkers
Jenni Laiti and Outi Pieski
Ovdavázzit - Forewalkers is an ancient and futuristic portal and path.
Through a constellation of Sámi walking sticks, Indigenous knowledge, ancestral technology, traditional crafts, sovereignty and good life meet in the present, past, and future.
We have always been here, we are still here, and we will always be here. We will walk on the path our ancestors made for us, and so will future generations.
Ovdavázzit - Forewalkers points to a life in harmony and accordance with the Earth, stating that we should not go faster than the pace of the land. Ovdavázzit - Forewalkers signals how life and mobility are based on a sustainable co-existence with the needs of the land. In times of climate and ecological crisis, self-governance and the good life on the land, by the land, and for the land is a way to survive and thrive.
Forest Bodies
Anushka Athique
Forest Bodies is a visual-poetic exploration of the transgression between body and land. It articulates the forest through the embodied and emplaced perspective of a political, imagined, affective set of mobile bodies.
Made up of two pieces, Forest Bodies invites the viewer to consider how we might make a forest, how we experience the forest and asks “what if we held the forest within our bodies?” From these two studies we try to understand what a forest is. Or what it could be if we understood it through our bodies.
FOR EST / PRO TEST
Jenni Laiti
A series of large-scale banners for Land at Lotherton Park Farm, Micklefield, owned by Highways England, where the future forest protests ecocidal corporate projects and is calling for afforestation on this field because, once, this field was a forest, and, once again, it wants to become a forest.
Woodland Creation
Jenni Laiti, Matt Taylor and Anushka Athique
Loss and recovery of biodiversity and the function of Human in both. 30 acres in Yorkshire.
The Forest is a Question We Answer
Jenni Laiti, María Faciolince Martina & Daniel Voskoboynik
Forests in Sápmi, Udmurt Elkun, Collserola, Antioquia and the missing forest of Kòrsou.
Press
The Yorkshire Post Ground-breaking work that imaginatively investigates pressing contemporary concerns
Advisory Group
Thanks to: United Bank of Carbon, Hyde Park Source, Frogmore Paper Mill, Lazy Man Coffee, University of Leeds, Leeds Coppice Workers Cooperative, Universidade Federal do Oeste do Pará (UFOPA), Lab Verde, Flávia Santana, Uthai Forest, Alexis Percival, Open Space Society, White Rose Forest, Amanda Crossfield, LS14 Trust, East Street Arts, Leeds City College, Neil Pentelow, Paul Chatterton, Peninah Murage and Luke Bennett.
