Time at the Tips of Conifers
The fifth annual interdisciplinary forest symposium
Meadow and forest land in the Orlické Mountains, Czech Republic
5 - 7 July, 2024
Map
While the structure of human time divides life into relatively precise moments and helps to institutionalize and rationalize not only human behaviour, more-than-human times - the times of animals, trees, stones, or seasons - unfold in their own interconnected progressions of being and aging.
This multiplicity of times - chronodiversity - is essential for understanding the relationship between biodiversity and temporal rhythms in ecosystems and for maintaining their resilience. At a time when climate change is driving the need for adaptive changes and transformations in body and plant rhythms, the interdependence and stability of interspecies biorhythms are also being transformed. How relevant are these changes in the perspective of long time?
Through artistic interventions, lectures, workshops, and work, the symposium explored the different forms of temporality, the diversity of species’ time cycles and the scales of age and aging that we can experience in nature. Within the confines of our normative time organized into seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years, we attempted to tune into the dimensions of long time and think in terms of the millennia that the oldest trees live to see.
Co-existence in the time of animals was explored in the part of the programme dedicated to the culture of pastoralism. The time of the shepherds and shepherdesses and the animals they are with in the landscape is the time of liminal beings, moving between “wildness” and culture. The cyclical movements from winter pastures to summer pastures and back (transhumance) and the associated culture and ritual of pastoral peoples are and have been linked to the changing seasons.
Through a variety of contributions ranging from the experiences of shepherds, shepherdesses, and artists working with pastoralism, to ethnological and cultural studies of pastoral cultures, to readings of literature, the sessions were seeking ways to engage pastoral practices in disrupting the anthropocentric relationship of humans with other-than-human worlds and times.
Participating artists and speakers: anto_nie (artist), Laia Estruch (performance artist), Fernando García-Dory (collaborative agency INLAND), Jan Géryk (legal theorist and political scientist), Raquel Friera and Xavier Bassas (art-research collective Institute of Suspended Time), Stanislav Hejduk (agronomist and grassland expert), Edka Jarząb (sound artist), Gabriela Benish-Kalná (artist), Kateřina Konvalinová (artist), Wojciech Kosma (performance artist and musician), Elia Moretti (percussion player and composer), Marc Navarro (curator and writer), Fran Painter-Fleming (writer and theorist), Jonáš Richter (artist), Sláva Sobotovičová (artist), Jakub Stejskal (aesthetician), Tereza Špinková (theorist), Jan Švéda (farmer and shepherd), Olga Švédová (farmer and shepherdess), Timmi (sound artist and producer), Sabina Vassileva (social anthropologist), Lisa-Marie Wakenshaw (yoga teacher).
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Organisational team
Dramaturgy: Edith Jeřábková, Tereza Porybná
Collaboration: Zuzana Blochová
Pastoralism and Transhumance section: Edith Jeřábková, Denisa Langrová, Ruta Putramentaite, Alex Sihelsk*
Curators of the Children's Forest Group: Nikola Brabcová, Barbora Kleinhamplová, Eva Koťátková
Music programme dramaturgy: Jakub Adamec
Production: Karolína Mikesková, Karolína Jansová
Technical Production: Ryan Kalkman, Jan Voda
Forest kitchen: Marko Čambor, Šenay Kobak, Marika Krčmářová
Bar: Veronika Eisensteinová, Diaraye Balde, Simona Ondáková
Graphic design: Róbert Púček, Ľubica Segečová
Simultaneous translation into English: Josef Havránek
Photography: Markéta Sasínová
Video: Dominika Goralska, Jakub Černý
Cooperation and special thanks: Václav Girsa, Jan Hejl, Jiří Musil, Marek Musil, Mirek Verbík, Pavlína Verbíková, Nikola Šmeralová, Dalibor Uher
The symposium Time at the Tips of Conifers is part of the activities of the curatorial organisation Are, which since 2019 owns and cares for a forest and meadow plots in Hnátnice village, Orlické Mountains, Czech Republic, and which initiated the formation of the Community for Cultivation, Theory and Art – Woods.
The Woods: More-than-Human Time project is funded by the European Union – Next Generation EU, the Czech Recovery Plan, the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, the Prague City Hall, and the State Cultural Fund of the Czech Republic.