Tu(r)ning into trees:

The multiplicity of becoming – root, trunk, branch, leaf

Kinship Very slowly burning, the big forest tree stands in the slight hollow of the snow melted around it by the mild, long heat of its being and its will to be root, trunk, branch, leaf, and know earth dark, sun light, wind touch, bird song. Rootless and restless and warmblooded, we blaze in the flare that blinds us to that slow, tall, fraternal fire of life as strong now as in the seedling two centuries ago.

— Ursula K. Le Guin¹

Alchorisma covers multiple threads of living in a multispecies world. This text untangles some of the lines that have run through this multilayered project. It touches on some of the ideas developed during the two worksessions, leading up to the collection of prototypes, texts, dreams and fictions presented throughout this online publication. The lines gathered here try to cover some of the threads that guided us in the alchemic meetings that occurred between the worlds of stones, trees, ghosts and algorithms wielding between artistic practice, animist knowledge and database technology.

The text elaborates on the knowledge we gathered from meetings with trees that took place during excursions and field trips, and uses these meetings as a pathway to revisit some of Alchorisma’s leading references, concepts and methodologies. The text uses these meetings with trees to unravel practices of attunement, attention, embodied immersion and care for other beings. They offer possibilities to use artistic practice and algorithmic technology as a means to open up new ways of engaging with trees, landscapes and other beings from a multispecies perspective.

First meeting: An unadjusted Douglas fir

Location: Bokrijk, Genk, Castle Garden

One of the most remarkable trees of the old English Garden around Bokrijk Castle, located between Hasselt and Genk, is an old Douglas fir with four stems. The English garden was created around 1900 together with the castle. A typical feature of the English park style was to create small groups of large, impressive (and often exotic) trees as a way to show one’s social status. In Bokrijk we see small batches of Douglas fir, as well as a majestic alignment of these firs marking the wide alleys of the park. The largest Douglas fir in Belgium is found here, although it is not even half the 100 metres it can reach in its native habitat (mainly America’s West Coast and British Columbia). The name of the species is derived from Douglas, the Englishman who first introduced the species in Europe in 1827. Other exotic trees we encounter in the park are the Japanese larch, Atlas cedar and the Pacific red cedar, a majestic tree that can live up to a thousand years (hence it’s nickname, giant arborvitae or tree of life). The park also holds the largest collection in the region of the monumental mammoth tree, of which two large specimens mark the entrance to the castle.

This style of garden is in stark contrast to plantations of trees, where straight stems are favoured to enhance productivity. When a tree grows in multiple stems it decreases stability and complicates the energy and water flows. In plantation forests meant for wood production, trees need to grow high and fast. ‘Unadjusted trees’ like this Douglas fir with its multiple stems would not be retained. However, for the joy of human delight, abnormal growth patterns and tree deformations were accepted and even encouraged in the English style, turning the trees into natural ‘follies’ that could inspire the visitor with feelings of awe and wonder. Nature as curiosity.

The multistemmed Douglas fir is part of the vast idyllic park surrounding the castle, fully constructed and man-made. Its origins are based on heroic travels. For the sake of showing off one’s social network and status, botanical curiosa like exotic tree species were trades as gifts among the higher classes, often ending up in private parks like this one. Paradise, however, requires continuous maintenance and meticulous management. Most of the trees were not adapted to our climate and that is why only a few of these remarkable exotic trees that were brought back from faraway travels managed to survive. Most of those that remain are found in private or botanical gardens. Apart from some exceptions, most of these exotic species require an extremely devoted gardener to keep them healthy and alive in the alien and often inhospitable grounds in which they were relocated.

Second meeting: a dead tree stump

Location: Bokrijk surrounding forest

‘Death does not end the networked nature of trees. As they rot away, dead logs, branches, and roots become focal points for thousands of relationships.’²

Dead wood is covered in mosses, lichens and different types of fungi. It is vibrant with life that at different moments of time cohabitate with the dead material, enhancing or thriving on the complex processes of organic decay. Small animals like rodents and birds use it to shelter, whereas the hollows and crevices can also serve as drinking pools. The moist areas allow for mosses to grow, creating fertile breeding grounds where all kinds of insects and beetles lay their eggs to hatch. By feeding on the wood, the fungi and the newly born insects produce fresh and nutrient hummus that in turn enables growth and gives life to the surrounding trees and plants.

‘Our language does a poor job of recognizing this afterlife of trees. Rot, decomposition, punk, duff, deadwood: these are slack words for so vital a process. Rot is detonation of possibility. Decomposition is renewed composition by living communities. Duff and punk are smelters for new life. Deadwood is effervescent creativity, regenerating as its “self” degenerates into the network.’³

As Peter Wohlleben so wonderfully describes it at the start of his international bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees, recent studies point to something even more astonishing: in a forest environment, a dead tree stump can in some cases even literally overcome its own death. Scientists have discovered that tree stumps can be kept alive by surrounding trees. While the tree stump itself is unable to extract water anymore, it can be provided a minimum of water by the trees around it. This suggests that trees have interconnected root systems enabling them to exchange nutrients with each other. A tree, even a dead one is never a single tree, but part of a larger forest organism, interconnecting with other trees as well as with many other beings.

More and more recent findings in biology suggest a shift from the perception of trees as single individual entities towards the forest as an entangled ecosystem or superorganism. As the example of the dead tree stump suggests, roots of different trees are connected with each other, allowing the exchange of water and minerals, and even communication. As Wohlleben explains so well in his book, this communication mostly happens with the aid of other species, most importantly types of mycorrhizae. These are types of fungi that live symbiotically between and within plant roots. Hidden underground, a rhizomatic world interconnects the roots of individual trees with a vast network of mycelium, which is the name of the underground threads of fungal organisms. A single mycelium network can extend over kilometres, interconnecting individual plants and trees into what has recently been termed the ‘woodwide web’. It suggests that trees are sentient beings but also that the forest acts as a social system where the older stronger trees protect the weaker or younger ones.

The interrelation between the tree and the mycelium is a form of symbiosis based on mutual benefit: while the fungal threads allow the trees to exchange information and nutrients, the mycelium is ‘paid’ with the sugar it feeds on. Slowly but steadily these new insights are upending our view of trees, suggesting that symbiosis, far from being a biological rarity, is in fact all around us. It is a far stretch from the tree as a beautiful yet single entity, as it was placed in the English garden park. From nature as curiosity to a new curiosity for nature, we may need to start acknowledging that it is precisely our Western and modernist concept of ‘nature’ itself that we need to do away with.

Third meeting: database ghost trees

Location: Bokrijk Arboretum database

The manager of the park and surrounding forests of Bokrijk introduced us to a huge database of all the trees in the park. In this database, trees are coded as species, numbers, coordinates; they are labelled as alive, in good, fair or poor condition, removed, unable to locate or dead, in multiple sublevels where clarity and ambiguity conflate the real tree and the data about the tree. Inputting and updating the information in the database is an exhaustive and time-consuming task that requires continuous action. Ghosts of dead trees linger. With the meeting of the dead tree stump in mind, we wonder, when is a tree truly gone?

The story turns our attention to how numbers, graphs, calculations and algorithms are used to describe and map the natural world today. The concept of nature nowadays is fundamentally intertwined with scientific observations and research encoded in database technology. And just as scientific objectivity turned out to be an unattainable goal, technology is conflated by those who create the database, those who manage it and those who update it.

It is precisely thanks to the massive expansion of database technologies and advances in computer modelling that the concept of the Anthropocene made its way into the current debate on climate change.⁴ Paradoxically, it is the elevated capacity of processing extensive amounts of data, which led to the acknowledgment of the disastruous impact of the anthropos on nature. We needed the concept of the Anthropocene to understand how urgent it is to decentre the human and move ahead with the ‘decolonization of nature’. According to cultural theorists like Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour and T. J. Demos, it is the modernist and dualistic view of ‘nature’ we need to get rid of. In rethinking the Anthropocene further into concepts like the plantationocene and the capitalocene, cultural theorists argue that the human-nature divide is not only what caused our problems in the first place, but is also what is keeping us from acting and dealing with the current crisis. Their argument is that we need to do away with ‘nature’ as a concept since it keeps us adhering to a world view where humans are placed ‘outside of’ and subsequently also ‘above’ nature.

Both human and natural sciences are increasingly viewing the world as an all-encompassing system where stones, organisms, animals, plants, bacteria, viruses and humans are part of an interconnected network. Within the network, one can never escape or ignore any of the other presences. If one species overrules the system, the effects of this imbalance will haunt the earth and leak into the future like radioactive waste. The current corona crisis, caused by a microscopic, tiny entity, is just one more example of these rippling effects. If we want to survive as a species and deflect the anthropos’ fate of turning into the ghosts of the Anthropocene, we need to fundamentally change the way we see the world.

With the aid of thinkers like Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour and many others coming from diverse fields like biology (Lynn Margulis, Margaret McFall-Ngai) or anthropology (Eduardo Kohn, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro) – to name just a few – a new paradigm is emerging based on a model of symbiosis and fundamental entanglement.⁵ In view of climate change and its pending disasters, a multispecies way of apprehending the world can offer a way out of negation, pure apocalyptic thinking or simple paralysis.

Fourth meeting: grafted walnut trees

Location: Vinay, Isère Valley, Le Grand Séchoir – Maison du Pays de la Noix

Our second field trip took us to the Isère Valley and the adjacent Vercors massif, located between Valence and Grenoble in France. As far as the eye could see, we were surrounded by vast walnut tree plantations. The walnut trees, we learned, are grafted. In this technique, which is different from cross-pollination, two plants are literally joined into one by creating a wound in one and inserting another type of plant into it so the tissues can grow together. The walnut trees are literally pieced together by man in order to enhance economic viability, mixing the positive qualities of one species with those of another.

The technique of grafting walnut trees was developed and mastered in the Vercors and is an important marker in the story of the famous Noix de Grenoble, one of the first DOC-labelled fruits. The story of the walnuts in the Isère Valley is interesting in its own right. Far from being an original regional product, the walnut business here started out as the result of a biological disease, the infamous Grape phylloxera, a type of yellow sap-sucking insect that feeds on the roots and leaves of grapevines and which started spreading through the more traditional vineyards of the region in the mid 1850s. The massive impact of this biological event made more and more farmers turn to walnut production.

The walnut tree in particular thrived in the region, shaded from strong winds and extreme colds by the massif of the Vercors that is aligned along the river, the ground scattered with pebbles forming an ideal type of soil for the walnut whose roots dive deep into the earth. The grafting technique of walnut trees was perfected by the mid nineteenth century, increased production and industrialization tying in with the opening of a new railway line from Grenoble to Valence, giving the Isère access to important international markets and pushing even more farmers to favour the walnut business.

The landscape of walnut trees is based on interrelated stories of different species, of insects, diseases, bacteria, bifurcating with regional geology and the rise of modern plantation technology, industrial production and global capitalism. ‘Landscapes enact more-than-human rhythms. To follow these rhythms, we need new histories and descriptions, crossing the sciences and humanities.’⁶ As Anna Tsing so beautifully pointed out in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World, the many interrelated encounters that form our contemporary landscape, depend on soils, mushrooms, disease organisms and people whose knotting together at specific points in time can lead to massive changes in the landscape.

Once we lay down the dominant image of linear modernistic time and its ideas of limitless growth and continued progress, we become susceptible to different rhythms that lie hidden in the landscapes of today, generating a new curiosity that allows us to follow ‘multiple temporalities’ and opens us up to a ‘revitalizing of description and imagination’. The famous Noix De Grenoble, today one of the region’s most important economic agricultural products, tells a story of many intertwining histories that gave rise to the plantations we see today, making the region one of the world’s largest walnut exporters, yet at the same time constantly struggling to ward off the plagues and pests that haunt monoculture lands.

Last meeting: the Lady of the Mountain

Location: Forêt de Coulmes, Vercors

From the place where we were staying we took a field trip to the park of the Forêt de Coulmes, a natural forest high up in the mountainous area around the Vercors at an altitude varying between 750 and 1500 metres. The main species in this dense and bucolic forest are beech trees together with birch, pine, rowan, oak and ash. The dense shadowy forest forms a sharp contrast to the open and strictly aligned walnut plantations in the valley below. The forest is full of history evoked in curious place names like le Pot de l'Aigle, Beauregard, Col de Pra l'Étang and les Charbonniers. It is scattered with ruins of hammocks, ancient water sources and old trails that sometimes end up in mind-blowing panoramic vistas that uncover the little towns that lie hidden inside the massif. Our guide, An Mertens, led us to this age-old forest in a walk that acquainted us not only with the local species of trees but also turned our attention to the Celtic values attributed to them: the wisdom of the oak, the protective capacities of the hazelnut, the strength and stability of the beech, the mystical capacities of the beautiful rowan tree. The rowan, with its alluring red berries is also called the Lady of the Mountain, because it is a species that thrives in harsh mountainous areas like here in the Vercors. The Celts saw the tree as a holy and highly spiritual tree, only to be approached or used by those who were initiated to higher forms of knowledge, the druid or the shaman. Its red berries have healing capacities but can also be poisonous. The rowan tree can help humans fight against dark forces …

The Celtic values of trees are based on the animist beliefs and shamanistic practices of the Celts, whose worldview was based on the forces of nature. In their world, non-human entities, animals, rivers, mountains and trees were endowed with a soul. Looking back at these ancient forms of knowledge, we learn that spiritual values were often based on or led to material connections between tree and human, such as types of usages of a tree’s wood, or link in with the nourishing or medicinal capacities of its leaves, fruits, nuts or berries. By acquainting ourselves with these spiritual perspectives, humans can (re-)enter into meaningful rapports with more-than-human beings and reacquaint ourselves with forms of knowledge that have been forgotten in our modern age but are increasingly the subject of renewed interest today, in art, science and even popular culture.

The animist tradition of the Celts is closely related to anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s argument about how indigenous knowledge can offer us insight into understanding the world as a ‘multiverse’. Ancient forms of ‘cosmovisions’ conceive of the Earth, man, animals, rivers, plants and stones as an indivisible interdependent relationship. Anthropology and ethnography in particular are ahead in this multispecies approach and the decolonization of Western modernist knowledge systems. In his book How Forests Think, ethnographer Eduardo Kohn immersed himself in the forest culture of the Runa people of Avila, a village in Ecuador’s Upper Amazon. The lives of the Runa are fundamentally intertwined with those of dogs, puma and the forest, but just as much with their relations to nearby postcolonial trading cities. How Forests Think argues that if we want to learn to understand and embrace the multispecies worldview, we need not only to attune ourselves to other beings, but also tune into the way these other beings see us and learn to understand their modes of perception and their language, even though it might not look like language to us. It is only when we see the world as an ‘ecology of selves’, where the self dissolves into a larger ecosystem, that we can move on to what Kohn refers to as an ‘anthropology beyond the human’.

‘We’re all – trees, humans, insects, birds, bacteria – pluralities. Life is embodied network. These living networks are not places of omnibenevolent Oneness. Instead, they are where ecological and evolutionary tensions between cooperation and conflict are negotiated and resolved. These struggles often result not in the evolution of stronger, more disconnected selves but in the dissolution of the self into relationship.’⁷

Together with anthropology and ethnography, the contemporary art world today is increasingly turning away from the white walls of the safe gallery spaces and diving deeper into the messiness of the world. Field trips, excursions and meetings with people from all kinds of different domains are an aid in opening up our view, in exercising the ‘arts of attunement’ and of becoming-other. Speaking with forest managers, hunters, owners of tree plantations and biologists, or to local or indigenous communities, spiritual healers and farmers helps us to immerse ourselves in the strange worlds of ‘more-than-human beings’ with which we share the world. This immersion in the multispecies understanding of the world is all but a naive retreat into a pristine and bygone idea of returning to the wild but takes into account the history, the formation of landscape, the ferality of life today where man-made interference and nature can no longer be set apart from each other. We need to attune, learn and immerse ourselves in order to regain the feeling of belonging to the Earth, which is the first step in establishing new forms of caring.

Multiple projects in this publication dive further into these thoughts, asking the question how we can enable and enhance the creative potential of these techno-nature intertwinements, setting up new becomings of roots, trunks, branches and leaves, between spirits of trees and databased trees.

References

Ginet, J., ‘Contribution historique à l'étude de la greffe du noyer en Dauphiné’,
Revue de Géographie Alpine, no. 19-1, 1931, pp. 187-198, https://www.persee.fr/doc/rga_0035-1121_1931_num_19_1_4564 (accessed 3 March 2021)
Haskell, D. G., The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors, New York, Penguin Books, 2017.
Kohn, E., How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013.
Morton, T., Being Ecological, London, Penguin Books, 2018.
Press, C., ‘A tree stump that should be dead is still alive; here’s why’, Phys.org, 7 July 2019,
https://phys.org/news/2019-07-tree-stump-dead-alive.html (accessed 3 March 2021)
Provinciaal Natuur Centrum, ‘Merkwaardige Bomen’, http://www.provinciaalnatuurcentrum.be/bomenabc, (accessed 3 March 2021)
Tsing, Anna L., The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2015.
Tsing, A. et al. (eds.), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Wohlleben, P., The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, London, HarperCollins Publishers, 2017.

A. Tsing et al. (eds.), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, p. M18. ↩
D. G. Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors, New York, Penguin Books, 2017, p. 84. ↩
Ibid., p. 97 ↩
Geologists have proposed the Anthropocene as a new geological era, after the Pleistocene or Holocene, where new and purely man-made materials are present in geological layers (e.g. plastic or radioactive waste materials like trinitite). ↩
See also 'We are all Earth' by Karin Ulmer. ↩
A. Tsing et al. (eds.), Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, p. G13. ↩
D. G. Haskell, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature's Great Connectors, p. viii. ↩