I picked up a leaf on the way from the city to the forest. Right around the corner there was a bar, and the local people told me: this is “embaúba” tree. I wrote it down on a piece of paper and kept walking. Later, I discovered that this tree is extremely resistant

 It doesn’t live long, about twenty-five years, but it survives any soil. Bigger was the surprise to know that those silver leaves seen in the distance in the middle of the forest are theirs. For the natives of this land, it is also called “umbaúba” or “hollow tree”, because it is hollow inside. In its hollow interior, ants live in symbiosis.

My antenna object was created from the leaf of this tree. On top of it I drew Koch’s fractals and a circled crown. An antenna is much more than a utilitarian object. Just like the trees in the forest, which communicate through the deepest of the earth and the air, the antenna is a body-house. It’s giver and receiver, mother and daughter, home and universe.

 I created this antena-oca with my own hands, weaving, in the coming and going, a web of connection. It was a slow and meditative practice that involved a collective of beings, objects and spaces. What it will become is an instrument of listening, but it’s already an amplified seam of the invisible. Perhaps with it, it’s still possible to hear what the roots of a forest have to tell us, and to remind us of the infinite web of communication without wifi – what the city, with its civilizing process, insists on making us forget.