Read Lucas Mertehikian's short text on Debora Hirsch's Vanishing Trees:
“‘Can plants speak?’ is a question that has obsessed biologists and philosophers alike, because what is ultimately at stake is how we relate to nature without fetishizing it. This millenia-old question also lies at the core of Debora Hirsch’s latest exhibition, Vanishing Trees, which opened in Milan, on January 15th at Palazzo Citterio, home to the Museo Nazionale dell’Arte Digitale. The opening was marked by a press conference featuring Debora Hirsch; Angelo Crespi, Director General of the Pinacoteca de Brera; Maria Paola Borgarino, Director of the Museo Nazionale dell’Arte Digitale; curator Clelia Patella; Martin Kater, Director of the Orto Botanico di Brera; and myself. The exhibition remains on view through April 15th.
Through a digital video installation displayed on the LED wall at Palazzo Citterio, Hirsch reanimates three of the oldest and most endangered trees that live in the Milan Botanical Garden: Ginkgo biloba, Torreya taxifolia, and Pterocarya fraxinifolia. The video unfolds as a series of striking visual narratives that decenter the human perspective, opening instead a space of artistic and biological experimentation in which to imagine what the history of the world would look like if told by trees.
This plant view is founded in the botanical and ecological specificities of each species, and yet the work is also deeply evocative. Or rather, it is evocative precisely because it emerges from an attentive and caring engagement with plant life, one that suggests the question may not be whether plants can speak, but whether we are capable of listening.”
Lucas Mertehikian, researcher at the New York Botanical Garden and Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, contributed the text to Debora Hirsch’s video installation Vanishing Trees.
The Italian media have covered the opening of Vanishing Trees widely, and you can read more about the show on Rivista Arte Mondadori, Il Giornale dell’ Arte, ARTUU, Il Giorno, Il Giornale, Corriere della sera, Ansa, and Chiasmo Magazine.
