The Patagonian microforests of Chile will be present in the exhibition “Forests. From Romanticism to the Future”, which will be presented between March 16 and August 11 at the German Romantic and Natural History Museums in Frankfurt, and the Sinclair House Museum in Bad Homburg.
The exhibition has a transdisciplinary nature and combines scientific, ecological and aesthetic approaches with pieces from the arts, cultural and forestry history and natural sciences.
Chile will be represented by the works of the visual artist Rodrigo Arteaga, made in collaboration with the Cape Horn International Center for Global Change Studies and Biocultural Conservation (CHIC), which will be in the German Romantic Museum, one of the three headquarters of the exhibition.
His experiences in the Omora Ethnobotanical Park, located on the banks of the Beagle Channel, at the southern tip of Chile, were the inspiration for the creations he brings to the exhibition. His observations there focused on mosses, fungi and lichens that make up what has been called “miniature forests.”
The products of this foray were presented in the “Point of View” exhibition, between November 2022 and March 2023 at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Quinta Normal in Santiago and some of them are part of their presentation in the German exhibition.
In it, he will exhibit a video he made during his visit to Omora, with a magnifying glass that he attached to the camera lens, “with the objective, he points out, of also increasing our ideas of the natural world to incorporate a whole variety of beings such as mosses, lichens and fungi. We imagine almost what an insect would see when walking through this landscape in the southernmost forests of the planet.”
In this action, he put into practice a concept developed by the Cabo de Hornos Study Center that consists of evaluating the world of nature that appears before the eyes with the use of a magnifying glass. Along the same lines, the aforementioned institution organizes “tourism with a magnifying glass” programs, in which visitors take excursions carrying this optical instrument.
The curator of the “Point of View” exhibition was the Doctor in Art History, Carolina Castro Jorquera, who is part of the CHIC team and participated with Arteaga in the excursion through Omora Park.
She remembers: “The experience of being in the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve touched our eyes very deeply. Firstly because by touring the southernmost forests on the planet we were able to see up close a great diversity of species and unique phenomena, which have no replica, and secondly because we were able to understand the enormous scale that the species that we had chosen to observe with a magnifying glass could reach thanks to to the almost zero contamination of their habitat.”
“Each step, he recalls, felt like walking on a living being that breathed at its own pace, each contact with it activated the synchronization of a common vital pulse. In that place we became lichen, we felt like moss, and a deep sense of collaboration emerged in us, a sense of interspecies solidarity that tuned our heartbeats to those of the earth forever.”
Regarding these experiences she has stated: “The combination of art and science serves as an inspiring and original way to promote the conservation of biocultural diversity. “Art stimulates analogical thinking, opening us to more empathetic ways of knowing ecosystems, developing a sense of place and responsibility for the care of its human and other-than-human co-inhabitants.”
Whispers of mosses
The foundations of the work that Arteaga will exhibit in Germany are found in the concepts conceived by the director and founder of the Cape Horn International Center, the philosopher and ecologist Ricardo Rozzi.
The latter will be present in the exhibition with a text that will appear in the catalogue, titled “Ecotourism with a magnifying glass to cohabit the miniature forests of Cape Horn.”
There he recalls that “global biodiversity assessments focused on vascular plants, such as trees, flowering plants and ferns, in the 1990s led to the perception that the floristic diversity of Cape Horn in the Magellan subantarctic ecoregion in the southwest of South America was minimal.”
“However, he adds, in the 2000s, botanical research revealed an alternative truth: the Cape Horn region constitutes a global biodiversity hotspot for mosses and liverworts, with 5% of the bryophyte species known to the world. science that are found in less than 0.01% of the planet’s land surface.
“This discovery, he emphasizes, stimulated us to a ‘change of lenses’ to observe, value and protect biodiversity in the extreme south of the Americas.”
He relates: “Together with the children of the local school in Cape Horn, we composed the metaphor: ‘miniature forests of Cape Horn’. In field experiences, children breathed while lying near mosses, observed their reproduction, growth and ecological interactions and, therefore, identified with them. Through these experiences the children cultivated a feeling of empathy with these small organisms and coined the expression ‘miniature forest people’ to refer to mosses and insects.”
“Through the lens of this biocultural ethical perspective, he concludes, mosses, humans, and all living beings are recognized as cohabitants, similar to siblings, rather than mere resources to be exploited. If global society could learn to perceive the whispers of mosses, the songs of birds, the rhythm of the oceans and the various human languages that perceive and respect these beings as cohabitants, then hope would resonate in harmonious cohabitation.
The exhibition considers the era of Goethe and Romanticism as the starting points of the search for a new relationship with nature. “Already then, the presentation of the exhibition expresses, the first highly topical ideas of natural ethics and ecological thinking emerged.
“With Romanticism, he adds, the forest becomes ‘wonderful’. Previously rejected as a place of horror, it is a symbol of the beauty and independence of nature for artists of the time.
Poems on land
Arteaga will also show at the German exhibition a video that he recorded between July and September of last year, during an artistic residency at the Center for Print Research, University of the West of England in Bristol, United Kingdom. He points out that in that activity his purpose was “to learn more about mycelial networks and explore non-human drawings made not by me, but by fungi.”
“I took samples of mushrooms, he notes, from local forests, to grow them in the laboratory and carried out experiments, which were understood as devices to observe what would normally be beyond our senses.”
“I grew mushrooms in petri dishes, trays and display cases, he adds, and observed the mycelium networks (the equivalent of mushroom roots) under the microscope. From these observations I made etchings on copper plates imitating the behavior of the mycelium, printed with white ink on black paper.”
“We exposed, he details, mycelium found on the forest floor directly on photosensitive plates, we also splashed diluent on a soft varnish on a copper plate. “We document a live lichen using photogrammetry and then print it in 3D.”
Likewise, he tried an idea that he found “very exciting”: “inoculating wooden letters with Pleurotus ostreatus (Oyster mushroom) mycelium for several weeks until the mycelium was completely rooted in the wood.” He then wrote poems on land using these letters.
“It was, remember, an intense bath of mycelium, stimulating the mycelium to grow from the letters outward. I photographed them at that time to create a series of prints titled the ‘fungal poems.’”
With the material he also produced an artist’s book titled “Mycelium Book”, which includes texts by mushroom specialist Giuliana Furci, and which will also be part of his proposal at the exhibition in Germany.
Bacteria and Listz
Beyond this exhibition, Arteaga is preparing to start a new artistic residency, this time at ACC Galerie Weimar, Germany, where he hopes to produce music from bacteria.
“The project, he explains, is an attempt to make music with cyanobacteria present in bodies of water found in Weimar to inoculate a series of scores by the composer Franz Liszt in particular ‘Liebesträume’.”
“Each note, he details, will be inoculated into a score-shaped biotray (similar to a Petri dish) with the greatest possible precision so that it is recognizable at first. “Then the idea is for the cyanobacteria to grow and expand these notes, thus changing the sound of the music and accepting change, decomposition and recomposition.”
“Part of the project, he adds, consists of finding the appropriate way to interpret the score, whether through a sound generated by a computer program or a musician who interprets the music. The result may be the real sound of music that the cyanobacteria transform into a sound installation.”
He hopes to also preserve the image of the score with the crops that he can later display through a print, an artist’s book or vinyl. “It would be incredible,” he says, “for example, to make a system of Arduino (electronic creation platform) and motors so that a piano plays itself and in turn interprets the constant change in the growth of cyanobacteria.”
Among the artists who will also exhibit their works for this exhibition at the German Romantic Museum are Nicholas Bussmann, Flechten, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Marcus Maeder, Antje Majewski, David Monacchi, Chris Shafe and Marieken Verheyen.