Supported by scientists, Russian artist Olga Kisseleva has woven a network of trees connected to each other in the four corners of the world, lending a sensitive ear to the mysterious plant dialogue thus created. A political and poetic bio-art, awarded multiple prizes this year, which she conceives of as "propaganda of the intelligence of the living". Meet.
In Brussels, in the dampness of their terrarium, Amazonian plants converse with their sisters just saved from forest fires, 10,000 km away, and taken refuge in a Brazilian lab. Along a Parisian boulevard, an aging cedar tree addresses its Asian contemporaries. And in the hollow of an Australian valley, a Wollemi pine listens to its distant Japanese cousins.
At the helm of this vegetal and borderless symphony, there is a woman, Olga Kisseleva. Since 2012, this Russian artist, teacher in the “art & science” department of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, has dedicated herself to a noble mission: to connect, thanks to the power of human technology, the people of trees. “ Trees communicate with each other via multiple channels ,” she says from Saint Petersburg, where she is developing part of this project called EDEN . Through the roots, through gas emissions, electrical signals or fluid circulation, they speak to each other ”.
The artist and his team have selected around fifteen of these channels, which they have analyzed and learned to listen to. Sensors of all kinds, connected to trees, collect this language, transcribe it into data, which are then shared with other specimens in other regions. Scientists from all over the world are working together, while the telecoms company Orange is providing technical assistance to build the vast network.
This forestry companionship, Olga Kisseleva concedes with a smile, is the result of a " pure accident ". Originally, the native of Leningrad (the old name of Saint Petersburg, editor's note) was not specifically connected to plants. Daughter of physicists, granddaughter of physicists, herself a graduate in physics and mathematics, her tropism leads her more towards the hard sciences. And then, she emphasizes, she has always lived in megalopolises. New York, Moscow, Paris… In short, nature is not quite part of its landscape.
"Why replace the living, so fascinating, by a bronze ersatz? "
It was in 2012, at random from an order, that his forest journey began. The town of Biscarosse, in the Landes, saddens to see the old and legendary elm, which inhabits history and local cosmogony, perish, demands a tribute from the artist. “ The municipality wanted to recreate the elm in the form of a sculpture ,” she recalls. The approach appealed to me ... why replace the living, so fascinating, by an ersatz bronze? »Stubborn, Kisseleva makes a counter-proposal: she promises to resuscitate the elm.
To thwart the disease that strikes this essence in France ( Dutch elm disease , editor's note) , Olga Kisseleva seeks the help of agronomists from INRA and CNRS, as well as the help of a distant ancestor, including the pretty crown inhabits the landscapes of his childhood: the Siberian elm. By crossing the genes of the two species, a resistant specimen will be born, planted in 2013, alive and well.
This inaugural plant work is the first in a long series. Because the news of the rebirth of the elm of Biscarosse has crossed borders, propelling, almost in spite of itself, the artist to the rank of “savior of trees”. And the exotic phone calls start to rain.
"Extending the knowledge of trees, but also poeticizing the living to better sensitize humans to its incredible intelligence"
In Karelia, first. The Russian republic, which borders Finland on its eastern flank, asks it to take care of the "drunken forests" where pines and birches, weakened by Pisonia lanceolata from Reunion Island ... the melting permafrost , lean as if they had boiled too much. In the Negev desert, in Israel, it is missioned to regenerate native trees and millennia exterminated by human bulimia. In Australia's Blue Mountains , where a few dozen specimens of a venerable ancestor of modern cedars survive deep in a protected valley, she is prayed to find a way to acclimatize the precious essence beyond the confines of her millennial sanctuary. . There will also be the wild apple trees of Kazakhstan, threatened by intensive agriculture, the Agathis australis(kaoris) of New Zealand, or the
Certainly, when it puts the suffering trees in relation to others in good health, so that the latter teach the former how to be better, very clever who could say what this “inter-tree” communication conceals. But the essential is not there. The purpose of the EDEN project, double, is exploratory and propagandist, underlines the artist: "To extend the knowledge of trees, but also to poetize the living to better sensitize humans to its incredible intelligence and its growing vulnerability ".
“After ten years of discussions, the trees have become my brothers and sisters. I admire their patience and their resilience, ”says Kisseleva today, awarded the prestigious OPLINE Prize and the STARTS Grand Prize in 2020 . “ It is time to recognize that their intelligence is as respectable as ours, and perhaps more than that, artificial, which fascinates our contemporaries so much. "
