Arboreal Ontologies:An Exploration of Trees and Humans in the Groves of Suri, 2023-2024

The search for identity both individual and collective has not only used elements of nature as a reference point but the nature–society borderline itself. The striking and rich materiality of trees and forest landscapes can become entangled in the creation of both individual and collective identities in many ways. This is often articulated through ideas of place and landscape and can operate on intermeshing scales which span from local to global. The differing ways identity is performed through trees and forest landscapes where Places act both as flows of materiality and relational agency.This project’s Work/s might be about a single tree rather than a forest landscape, but its eloquence shows how trees become symbols of identity; representing place, belonging and loss of place. Trees may become powerful presences that articulate practices and memories of home and other forms of identity and belonging. Forests are of course made up of individual trees, yet they are not mere populations of trees, but whole formations of ecology, custom, politics, legal status and land use. Forests create powerful landscapes which can enclose the person, enclose whole communities, even nations. They become cultural symbols (Davis 1988) and become entangled in the construction of identity. Human and non-human life is read as an immediate yet also enduring, relational process of bodies in place and space which are mobile, sensing, engaging, responding, exchanging, making, using, remembering, knowing and revisiting. Here Identity is considered as being influenced by relational, material and temporal processes where materiality and agencies of trees (Jones and Cloke 2008) are entangled with ecological, cultural, political and economic processes in the formation of identity.