FOAM | October 4th 2023

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Hira Nabi invited the Care Ecologies research group, to How to Love a Tree? | Wild Encounters, installed as a video triptych at FOAM, and a shared discussion on concepts of time learned from forests, relationality and the poetry of Etel Adnan.

The triptych is part of Hira Nabi’s broader ongoing exploration of forests, trees, and our relationship to them. The installation was first and foremost a reflection on the nature of love, opening up a space for interspecies care, whilst challenging the restrictions on whom and what our societies allow us to care for. A manifestation of the potentiality of love, an offering, a gesture of generosity and kindness: a reciprocity.

Attending to (unravelling) ecosystems in their ecological durations; from small signs of the forest in response to weather changes, to bigger shifts that form fleeting yet unequivocal temporal markers in the landscape, to a deeper time of colonial ghosts, Hira Nabi invited participants into a sharing that focuses on expanding on experiences of time through fragments of reading material that inspired the work - by i.a. Etel Adnan, and thinking together through writing, recording and dialoguing. 

Through these various exercises and discussions, the workshop prompted a reflection on how we can live and relate according to “time’s other side”. How do different temporalities feel? How can trees measure time? Can humans perceive “forest time”, and what would that do for our relationships to nature and each other?