Simulacrum of a Forest

Simulacrum of a forest raises questions about the interdependent relationships between human and non-human agencies, deconstructing the anthropocentric concept of nature, species and intelligence. The focus of the project is on the environmental alterations resulting from the Vaia storm: a violent hurricane that struck between 25 October and 5 November 2018 in the Alpine range between Trentino and Veneto.

The disaster resulted in approximately 14 million felled trees and the post-disaster favored the out-of-scale diffusion of the Ips typographus L., an organism naturally present in forest ecosystems that plays an important ecological role, which after Vaia had the possibility of reproducing en masse, increasing its potential to attack and damage spruce trees that survived the storm. From the human point of view, a catastrophe within a catastrophe, directly linked to climate change.

Named this way because of the characteristic grooves it produces under the bark of trees, the typographer bark beetle, with its proliferation, capitalization and colonization represents the perfect synthesis of human action on the planet, so much so that it pushes the author of the project to ask himself whether the capitalism itself is a natural agent. It is no coincidence that the project is contaminated with the thought of Jean Baudrillard and Timothy Morton: human society and nature are not distinct concepts, but only two closely connected aspects of the same all-encompassing reality.

Going significantly into the tunnels dug by the bark beetle means experiencing other forms of the same intelligence that determines us.