BELLA

I picked up a leave on the path from the city to the forest. Right at the corner there was a bar and the local people told me: this is embaúba. I wrote it down on a piece of paper and kept walking. Afterwards I discovered that this tree is extremely resistant. It lives a short time, about twenty-five years, but it can survive any soil. I was even more surprised to learn that those silver leaves seen in the distance, in the middle of the forest, are from this tree. For the natives of this land, it is also called umbaúba or hollow tree, because it is hollow inside. In its interior holes live ants in symbiosis.

My object ‘antenna’ was created from the leaf of this tree. On it I drew Koch’s fractals and a crown in a circle. An antenna is much more than a utilitarian object. Like the trees in the forest, which communicate between the deepest part of the earth and the air, the antenna is a body-house. It is giver and receiver, mother and daughter, home and universe. I created this hollow antenna with my own hands, weaving in the coming and going, a web of connection. It was a slow and meditative process, involving a collective of beings, objects, and spaces. What it will become is a listening instrument, but it is already an amplified sewing of the invisible. Perhaps with it  will still be possible to hear what the forest’s roots have to tell us, and make us remember the infinite web of communication without wifi – that the city, with its civilizing process, insists on making us forget.