Uriel Orlow. Forest Times

Forest Times brings together two major recent projects by artist Uriel Orlow, Reading Wood (Backwards), 2022, and Forest Futurism, 2024, in which plants are simultaneously political actors, witnesses to the past and guides for the future. With Reading Wood (Backwards), Orlow turns his attention to the entanglements of human and non-human actors in order to read the archive against the grain, asking what would restituting to the natural world mean, while with Forest Futurism, it is the life of plants themselves, outside or beyond the time of human history, that takes center stage. Working across film and 3D modelling, the latter project connects the palaeontological deep time of tree fossils with future forest modelling to imagine, with the voice of children, more-than-human scenarios from the point of view of trees. Set in South Tyrol/Alto Adige and conducted in dialogue with a palaeobotanist and climate scientists, the project forges connections between local scientific research and global climate concerns and the urgent need for alternative visions of the future.