(Re)learning tree-time
Losæter, Oslo, Norway | Spring & Autumn 2024
‘We are all grandchildren and we are all ancestors’, Julia Whaipooti, Maori lawyer & children’s rights campaigner.
‘I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past’, Maori proverb.
‘We do not inherit the land from our ancestors;
we borrow it from our children’, Apache saying.
‘trees teach us about life at the speed of wood.’
Richard Powers, novellist.
ABOUT
This project was inspired by many years of thinking and feeling that humans have been disconnected from the cycles of nature that govern the planet they live on. This has caused them to think more and more in the short-term as opposed to the long-term ways of nature (and how do humans define nature anyway?). More-than-humans still live according to these cycles, like many indigenous communities, but some humans, especially in the West, have forgotten that they also still do. Maybe many of the reasons why we humans are in all kinds of crises today (climate, justice, financial, etc..) stem from this lack of long-term thinking and by this disconnection to nature. Maybe we humans have a lot of knowledge to re-learn from more-than-humans and this can help us to imagine more sustainable futures together. It has been difficult for me to put words to these thoughts and ideas in the past.
Collaboration is part of Liselli’s practice and she is interested in discussing these thoughts together with fellow collaborators, workshop participants and anyone else interested in discussing the topic at hand, to see how the knowledge gained can be shared and passed on.
The aim of this project is to explore, together with the participants of the various workshops and collaborators, how trees can help us humans get an idea of time where past, present and future are linked. By learning about trees from different perspectives, how they function and grow, and about the different time frames this entails, we hope that this can give us an insight into expanding our current short-term thinking. One can argue that a tree is a physical manifestation of time: knowing that it was planted 100 years ago, and imagining the world then, compared to interacting with it, in the present. This creates a different awareness of time, a newfound respect for how long things take to grow, to make, to value.
‘(Re)learning tree-time’ is also inspired by the space and ethos of Losæter, which contrasts with its fast-changing surroundings. Similar to a tree, one can say that time moves differently from ‘human time’ in the space that is Losæter. Philosopher R.Krznaric likens trees to slow-time clocks ‘not only marking the years with their gradually expanding growth rings but also marking the cyclical rhythms of nature by changing with the seasons’. The idea of re-learning long-term thinking from slower-paced perspectives on time, in our increasingly fast paced and short-term thinking human societies, is one of the key pillars of this project.