Breathe Congo

In this penultimate Viewing Room, we’re moving into the green. Breathe Congo: a Reflection on the Growing Deforestation of Central Africa’s Rainforest is a land art piece with accompanying text, first presented at the Stellenbosch Triennale in South Africa (2020). This is a living interactive artwork – a spiralling path of trees, an opportunity to go inward and to reflect. Honouring the green heart of Africa, the world’s second lung, the artwork is a meditative path and an elemental gesture contemplating the beauty and fragility of our relationship and interdependence with one another and with our natural world.

Every tree a silent majestic witness, and an urgent reminder,
That we exist now and our collective future is in our own hands.
A spiral, like breath, is both radiating out and drawing inward. Infinite.
Without beginning and without end.
The root of the word ‘spiral’ comes from the Latin spirare: to breathe, to inspire, to expire.
This is our earthly contract with the trees and the forests.
We only exist in togetherness.
They are breathing us.
And we are breathing them.
The choices we make now are creating the future.
TOMORROW THERE WILL BE MORE OF US.
May we be wise. May the trees and forests still remain.
May the breath be without end. May it not spiral out of control.
May we be the path for the footsteps of our children and their children and the children of their children’s children.
The breath of the future.
May we be the miracle memory.
May we become the wise ancestors who left a natural world worthy of its future dreamers.

The Congo Basin in central Africa is home to the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world after the Amazon. Often referred to as the “Green Heart” of Africa and the “World’s Second Lung”, the Congo Basin rainforest is around 301 million hectares and spans six countries: Cameroon, Central African Republic (CAR), Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon.

The WWF tells us – ‘A mosaic of rivers, forests, savannas, swamps and flooded forests, the Congo Basin is teeming with life. Gorillas, elephants and buffalo all call the region home. There are approximately 10,000 species of tropical plants in the Congo Basin and thirty percent are unique to the region. Endangered wildlife, including forest elephants, chimpanzees, bonobos, and lowland and mountain gorillas inhabit the lush forests. 400 other species of mammals, 1,000 species of birds and 700 species of fish can also be found here. The Congo Basin has been inhabited by humans for more than 50,000 years and it provides food, fresh water and shelter to more than 75 million people. Nearly 150 distinct ethnic groups exist and the region’s Ba’Aka people are among the most well-known representatives of an ancient hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Their lives and well-being are linked intimately with the forest.’

• This large and important wilderness region absorbs vast amounts of carbon dioxide which is crucial to the fight against climate change, helping to mitigate rising global temperatures. Additionally, it helps to regulate local and global rainfall, to safeguard both water and soil quality, and to control disease.

• According to Carbon Brief, ‘The effects of tropical deforestation on climate go well beyond carbon, deforestation also affects rainfall. At a local level, it changes rainfall and water run-off patterns making the remaining forests drier. It could also have global impacts with scientific models showing that the complete destruction of tropical forests in central Africa would reduce rainfall in southern Europe and the upper and lower US Midwest.’

• France’s Environment Minister Ségolène Royal has stated that researchers believe that deforestation in Central Africa may have catalysed the most recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa: ‘This destruction of the natural habitat of fruit-eating bats drove the animals to approach human settlements to find food and the virus may have been transmitted during this increased contact resulting from deforestation…’

Factors that are contributing to deforestation and destruction of the Congo Basin rainforests:

• Growing global demand for coffee and cocoa – this region produces 70% of the world’s cocoa.

• Unprecedented timber demand, with a specifically rapid growth in demand from China.

• Unsustainable, unregulated, and illegal harvesting of wood.

• Road-building by industrial logging companies has created opportunity for further illegal logging and wildlife poaching in remote areas once unreachable.

• Large numbers of displaced refugees from armed conflict and civil war have been forced to live off the land which has severely impacted forests and wildlife. WWF reports the demand for fuelwood and charcoal has led to the deforestation of Virunga National Park in the DRC.

How do we help to create an emotional connection to the wealth of environmental data available to us? How do we instil a sense of urgency and also a sense of agency? Perhaps through beauty, and the simple experience of walking slowly through a cool and calm spiral of trees, the spiral of life, whose centre reveals a mirror which reflects a glimpse of ourselves amidst the trees and sky, we can provide a visceral understanding and personal connection in ways that environmental data may not offer on its own. The opportunity to observe ourselves and our actions, a reminder that we are active participants within an inseparable whole.

Pieter Colyn is a South African Land Artist and Landscape Designer based in Stellenbosch, South Africa. He is the owner and founder of ART Cederberg, a growing outdoor sculpture park where people can experience contemporary sculptures by leading South African artists set against the backdrop of pristine nature and ancient rock forms. ART Cederberg is set within 16,000 hectares of protected wilderness and is part of the Klein Cederberg Nature Reserve located in the Cederberg Mountains, 2.5 hours outside of Cape Town in South Africa. ART Cederberg’s mission is to converge art, wilderness, and ecological conservation.

Emilie Miller is a writer based in New York City. She has been published in The New York Times and was one of six foreign authors chosen to write for: Racconti Dal Mondo, a book of short stories about Cagliari, Sardinia. Her play Cinghiale! earned her a Los Angeles Stage Alliance Ovation Award Nomination and was also listed by Angeleno Magazine as a Top Ten pick. The Katrina Exercise, a play chronicling Emilie’s time spent volunteering with The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, was presented in excerpt form at The Kitchen in New York City as part of The Field’s Emerging Artist Residency (made possible in part by the Lambent Foundation Fund of the Tides Foundation).

Avantgarden

Avantgardening is what artist Evalie Wagner calls the interventions in which she engages with and within nature. In the Botanical Garden of the University of Vienna, she has designed a huge walk-in installation in a greenhouse. A hanging herbarium transforms the space, which is empty in summer, into an impressive art venue that is both an image of nature and a staged cultural landscape.

In our current era – the Anthropocene – the manipulation of flora and fauna has reached a new dimension, and nowhere else other than in the garden does our human relationship to nature become so directly vivid. The unrestrained exploitation and economisation of our planet’s resources and the far-reaching interventions in the Earth’s processes are leading to the destruction of habitats and the progressive loss of intact nature and biological diversity. In this context, botanical gardens have become important preservers and places of scientific documentation of this diversity.

The Botanical Garden of the University Vienna houses around 11,500 plant species from all continents, a collection that has been subject to constant change since its foundation in 1754. Botanical gardens have always been an expression of the endeavour to create an overall view of the plant cosmos of our world through research and cataloguing. With the help of living and dried plant collections, they have become flourishing research and scientific institutions over the centuries. Such an artificially created garden is fascinating not because we think it is untouched, but because a cultural landscape has been created here that flirts with knowledge and aesthetics.

The artist transforms this systematic scientific approach into visual narratives that go beyond botany. She creates a sensual installation with large hanging fabric panels that gather a variety of plant species. Exploring themes of coexistence, botany and the aesthetics of nature representation, the walk-through herbarium creates an open and transformative universe that brings the viewer closer to the subject of ecology and the analogous sensibility of nature from a different perspective.

In the midst of the cultivated nature of the Botanical Garden, a huge plant atlas is thus created that interweaves the visible with the imaginary and illustrates the complexity of trying to grasp nature with the mind alone.

The installation is embedded in a tapestry of sound (see the film below). ‘Noyaux’ is the name of the piece by multi-instrumentalist Benoît Pioulard. Translated from French, it means ‘fruit stones’. Pioulard is primarily concerned with places that have not been created or changed by man. Floating weightlessly, he refers to the numerous areas of origin of plants. The Botanical Garden has always been considered the place where many of the commonly known plants were first planted and propagated. The installation thus also becomes a small archive, a macro-order is presented condensed as a micro-order. As a heterotopia, the garden gathers the whole world in one place, writes the philosopher Michel Foucault. It stands symbolically for the whole, precisely because it is a limited and remote place. The two attitudes, the reasonable, scientific, controlled one and the romantic, wild, natural one, are actually two aspects of a unity. For, as Foucault goes on to note, the garden represents the smallest parcel of the world and at the same time its totality. In this respect, thinking about the garden through the medium of art could change our view of the world.

Evalie Wagner (1983) is an Austrian artist and designer, who currently lives and works on a farm in Upper Austria and in Vienna.

She studied at the New Design University St. Pölten and the University of Art and Design Linz, where she graduated in Fine Arts and Cultural Studies: Experimental Art and Painting. She has won a number of awards and grants and participated in several exhibitions and residency programmes in Austria and abroad.

Her interdisciplinary work is marked by a wide range of historical and aesthetic connotations, references to design and crafts, and is situated in the space between the poetic and conceptual. Based on extensive research she creates subtly designed, associative works, which can be described as visual metaphors. Her site-specific installations are compelling narratives composed of different elements, be it paintings, botany or objects. With a main focus on floral aesthetics, she calls herself an avant gardener.

Credit Scene (After the End of the World)

Luke Myers work is about rebuilding empathetic connections with the natural world, in response to the disasters of anthropocentrism. He spends time in forests, with insects, trees, and plants, learning about and from them in a sensory way, not an empirical one, and translates those experiences into sculpture, video, and socially motivated action. With this process, attending to the often unseen but equally important members of the ecosystem, he seeks to question hierarchies and capitalist, human exceptionalist paradigms that currently define the Gaia/Anthropos relationship. Telling forest stories to people, and sharing our stories with the forest, he proposes new valuations and positions for both species. We’ll hear from the artist below, explaining the elements of his artwork Credit Scene:

Roll Credits

This work, Credit Scene (After the End of the World), is about the attempts and failures of technology to recreate nature. Or, not-quite-failures, because the results are compelling even as they trend toward obscurity. It explores the contradictions of natural and artificial, and what happens when they mimic each other, the beauty in the uncanny. It’s also about the kind of weird intrusions or incursions that technology makes, the way it seems out of place but also welcome. There is a dissonance between artificial and organic materials, forms, and sounds, and I’m interested in how both sides work to reconcile that. Someone sets their ringtone to a birdsong. A bird learns to sing like a car alarm. Which is the better technical reproduction? Which do you want to hear? Can I find ways to attune that dissonance to a harmony?

Responsibility

Sometimes I don’t pick up litter or plastic when I come across it in the woods. I just take a picture and leave it. I’m just less and less sure about how useful I can be as an individual. If you remember the “crying Indian” TV ad, about littering and personal responsibility, that ad was created by corporations who were facing increased regulations over the amount of trash their products were generating. Instead of changing it they shifted the blame to consumers. But whose trash is it?

Trouble

I don’t mean I can just ignore the trash. I live here too. And I don’t mean I’m “giving up” or that the future is hopeless, I’m just shifting focus to the present. I think about Donna Haraway’s idea of “Staying With the Trouble” a lot. She talks about how as motivations, hope and despair are both useless, since immediate action doesn’t require either, it precludes both. She also has a lot of ideas about human-animal entanglements and how our relationships can benefit multiple species. She talks about racing pigeons being used for meteorological data gathering. You could say “why do we force birds to wear backpacks” but she doesn’t pass judgement, just looks at the problem and says – isn’t this interesting? Timothy Morton (in Hyperobjects) says there are no good solutions, or every choice we make is wrong. But that means we are free from choice-paralysis and so we can just get on with it. Haraway would say get on with “Living and dying well”. That is meant to be an inclusive statement, as she writes about humans and other-than-humans together.

Fade to Black

In previous works, I was trying to imagine something different, even absurd. In Credit Scene, I’m not trying to be positive or negative – not that I think it’s necessarily neutral – but I want people to see the good and the bad together. The original idea for the piece, aesthetically, was basically a river of green, framed by sleek black. I wanted these beautiful colours and shapes that are like an archive or layers of memory, just streaming out of a robotic, futuristic apparatus… beautiful, and sad at the same time. And of course as the layers add up the imagery gets more and more obscured, the greens and blues shift darker toward black. So, it is a warning in that sense, a wolf howl at night.

G-D Algorithm

You might notice the form feels vaguely organic. Yes it is! It’s actually a shape generated by an AI, or more specifically, a generative design algorithm. Rather than modelling the entire thing, I gave the computer certain parameters - where I need to attach something, or where it should be fixed to the floor, the loads and vectors it needs to handle. Then I input the materials I want to use, their structural properties, and the method of manufacturing, which could be flat (for 3 axis CNC) or additive, for 3d printing. The computer analyses that information, creates a model of the forces involved, and optimises the shape for strength-to-weight, so that the part will be as light and rigid as possible given the design constraints. It iterates on that process hundreds of times until it reaches convergence. The interesting thing is that the process creates really organic looking shapes. It’s actually inevitable, if the algorithm is working right. What is a bone? A series of parametric inputs, iterated on until it’s optimised for strength-to-weight. A tree branch is the same. The algorithm is a technology that imitates nature, to varying degrees of success.

Carbon Fiber

The first thing you see looking at Credit Scene is all the carbon-fiber. I used carbon fiber because of its associations with futuristic technology, spaceships, etc. It’s a materials science development that’s accessible and it conjures the idea of “the newest”. In spirit it’s basically the opposite of wood, maybe the oldest building material we have (and still the best for many applications). There’s also a lot of waste that goes along with it. It’s a contradiction in the work (using environmentally unfriendly materials) but I think there are no “right choices” inside (what Timothy Morton calls) hyperobjects, like climate change and eco-disasters. I think it’s important to recognise but I don’t let it paralyse the process. I did use bio-resins and recycled materials whenever possible, but the environmental impact of these new materials is severe, and that goes along with the other tech resources we all use like lithium for the batteries in our cell phones and everything else, and even the energy for the internet, or bitcoin, or the night sky getting cluttered with Starlink satellites. I think it reinforces the idea of tragedy and loss co-existing with beauty in the work.

River of Green

There is an argument in Credit Scene about image reproduction – specifically how oversaturation of imagery creates obfuscation. But that doesn’t mean we stop trying. How many landscapes were painted by American luminists? Are the subsequent efforts of photographers any more successful? Have you ever felt like you were outside when you looked at a picture of a tree? In a previous work I tried to recreate the experience of a nature walk, surrounding the viewer with video projections, but it was most interesting in how it completely failed its premise. In Credit Scene I’m trying again, this time with a printer. I use image sets of local trees, all from one location, so the print becomes like a portrait of a place. But the more it tries, the more it fails to deliver the experience of being there. The image stream starts out green but because of how pigments work it eventually turns darker and darker. And of course, the tree-recreation is an echo of the g-d algorithm you can see in the support structure.

Waterfalls

There is one more vignette I keep thinking about. In a National Geographic short video, where they’re documenting the effects of land reclamation in Southeast Asia, you see a fisherwoman from a Cambodian village, whose livelihood and local ecosystems have been destroyed because of sand dredging. They are taking the sand from the rural coasts and using it to build more land in Singapore. The National Geographic team brings her to Singapore and she visits the botanical gardens where the world’s largest indoor waterfall has been built on top of her sand. It’s enclosed in a massive glass dome, and all planted with a collection of rare orchids from the Malaysian jungles. As she’s walking underneath this huge constructed landscape she says “If this was real, imagine how beautiful it would be!” That reaction, that bittersweet mix of wonder and loss, that’s it! That’s everything.

Luke Myers is an environmental artist, raised in midcoast Maine.

He holds a BA in studio arts from the University of Maine at Augusta, and an MFA from the University of South Florida. His multidisciplinary work has been exhibited internationally, and held in public collections at University of Maine Augusta, and the Waldoboro Public Library.