Another imagination

The trees will have the last word.

Joan Brossa

Do trees have imagination? Can some trees be more creative than others? And if they are creative, what kind of images do they represent? And where do they show them? These questions are difficult to answer because, to begin with, we find it hard to believe that there could also be other beings with the capacity to think and imagine, apart from human beings.

Trees speak to us, they encourage us to think beyond the limits of our knowledge. They teach us that life can express itself in ways we would never have imagined. Perhaps, in the way they grow, breathe and interact with their environment, there is a kind of imagination, a creativity that manifests itself in each of their parts.

In the project Another Imagination I pay attention to the trunk which is the organ that connects the roots and the leaves, between the inner world and the outer world. It is the spine of the tree. Inside there are flows of life, an exchange of substances and energy, which will be part of the manufacture of new forms and new tissues. This organ is the visible, unique and expressive face of the tree, the one that is there in a perennial way and where its evolution is manifested: a whole language.

To carry out the work, I have taken as a reference the community of trees that coexist with other beings in a large city. In this space, 1,660,000 people and 1,400,000 trees interact.

The objective, therefore, has been to search for and portray, among thousands of trees, the maximum possible number of species present in the city. Finally, I have selected an individual from 373 different species, of which, for me, have produced the most creative work.

The result is photographs that show the slow but intense work with which the tree externalizes its imagination. On each image I have written the name that corresponds to its taxonomy and also its common name. In this way I try to return to the trees the status they deserve as citizens and, therefore, to equate them with us.

We must consider trees not as objects but as subjects, and this implies recognizing their capacity for agency and their intrinsic value, which invites us to redefine our relationship with the natural world from a position of respect and responsibility. They are silent spectators of the balance between the individual and the collective, between the ephemeral and the eternal.

The project aims to highlight the purpose of trees as a political and philosophical act, with a deeply activist and symbolic dimension, as trees embody key themes such as environmental struggle, the connection between humans and nature, and the tensions between development and conservation. Exploring this aspect allows it to go beyond the aesthetic, becoming a statement, a manifesto or even a resistance.

Another Imagination consists of five chapters: Imagination, Community, Identity, The World Tree and Correspondences.

Imagination. With a multitude of pigments, the fruit of the relationship between the earth and the sky, the trees draw a dreamlike, fantastic world, full of magic. Lines, volumes, shapes and textures combine to create images, which spring from the trunks with an infinite number of nuances, with primal and deep colors resulting from the constant exchange with the environment. This is the central chapter. It consists of 373 photographs, of which a selection of sixty are shown.

Community. Throughout history, our relationship with trees has been very close, to the point that, with the desire to make them close to us, we have given them, in addition to scientific names, common names taken from our cultural references that help us identify them. There are names that refer to love, life, paradise; others are toponyms that help us locate them. This part of the project brings together the nomenclature of the popular imagination of the 373 trees.

Identity. Like human beings, trees have a date of birth, a name (the popular one) and a surname (the scientific one). They also have a sex, a home and a family. With a model of an identity document that includes all the information relating to the tree, I record their existence and, like us, treat them as citizens. The tree of the world. Leaves that are trees and trees that are leaves. Buildings, vehicles, street furniture, people… and trees. Their appearance, their colours and their coexistence in the city make up an installation with photographs of the 373 trees and their relationship with the environment, accompanied by a box-soil that contains them.

Correspondences. Human works and tree works. Images often remind us of others, giving rise to what we would call analogies. Can there be images created by other living beings that resemble images created by humans? Who has been inspired by the other? This part of the project tries to find correspondences between the works made by trees and those made by humans.

Barcelona, 2019-2024