Be-coming Tree: Collective Eco Live Art

Basic information

Project Title

Full project title

Be-coming Tree: Eco-art and Digital Tech link Europe with Global Reforestation and Self-empowerment

Project Description

Be-coming Tree showcases live artists all over the world simultaneously engaging with local trees or woodlands. Observed on a shared Zoom screen, they offer a window on diverse ecosystems and myriad ways of engaging with the theme: Be-coming Tree. Audiences witness live actions, (theatre) performances, stillness, dance. Tickets include rainforest tree donations, making this entanglement of barefoot digital technology and nature a collective eco-art action to support reforestation and solidarity.

Project Region

Nova Gorica, Slovenia

EU Programme or fund

Description of the project

Summary

Be-coming Tree started as a personal live-streamed, durational performance by transmedia artist Jatun Risba (Slovene, b.1986) which took place in April 2020 in Panovec Forest in Nova Gorica, Slovenia during the 1st global Covid-19 lockdown. The 1hr communion with an uprooted beech tree was healing and meaningful: it provided the artist with an insight into the coexistence of life and death in daily existence. The tree trunk on which Risba was laying in stillness, was a site teeming with life while undergoing the process of self-composting. Inspired by this vision of interdependence, the project gained a collective, inclusive and self-empowering direction. Be-coming Tree branched out into a co-creation of 3 female/non-binary artists with ages ranging from 34 to 73: Jatun Risba, Danielle Imara and O. Pen Be and is producing seasonal live-streamed collective Live Art events that have so far included 71 artists from 32 countries, 6 continents. Almost half of the participating artists were European or based in the EU.

This intergenerational, global initiative is raising ecological awareness while providing free training in media literacy to older and intersectional artists that enables them to reach international visibility and new audiences in times of social distancing and general lack of opportunities. A pay-what-you-can ticketing system embeds donations for planting rainforest trees into every Be-coming Tree monetary transaction, paving the way to more sustainable and accessible models of economy in service to environmental restoration.

The Be-coming Tree project is currently in the process of becoming a community-interest non-profit company based in UK with a hub in Nova Gorica, Slovenia in the context of the centre for creative practices Eks-Center which will offer IT, networking and business support for the further development and expansion of the project in Europe and globally. Be-coming Tree is a rhizome of a new European and terrestrial eco-entanglement.

Key objectives for sustainability

Be-coming Tree aims to:

create an inclusive digital platform for eco-art practitioners that develops and promotes self-sustainable economic models from which all benefit: human, nonhuman & more-than-human. Achieved via increasing inclusivity & digital know-how
increase ecological awareness of artists/audiences in EU & globally. Events promote reforestation & sustainability.
implement green economic models supporting environmental sustainability and reforestation in monetary transactions. Event tickets include tropical reforestation donations.
increase media literacy skills of artists enabling sustainable independent careers. Over 105 artists learned to live stream and promote work.
increase media literacy skills of non-digital native audiences facilitating use of online platforms, to be included in the digital world. Older participating artists learnt tech skills.
enhance visibility of rural, unrepresented live artists and showcase work. Artists from marginalised sectors and rural areas gained global audiences, peer networks.
make eco-art practices system-relevant and part of official Contemporary Art conversation. Articles being published in eco art publications & Performance Magazine Live.
support cross-pollination and networking of distanced artists from different backgrounds, nations and of different ages (transfer of skills across generations). Artists’ post-event gatherings.
support interdisciplinary collaborations and dialogues via live streamed talks & participatory projects linking people interested in ecology, climate change, arts. Authors & film-makers booked for panel discussions.
create an inclusive borderless arts community. Participants use movement, gestures, actions rather than speech easing language barriers and opening sense of community.
promote appreciation of biodiversity & local sustainable tree planting projects. Over 600 audience members witnessed diverse ecosystems, supported reforestation.

Key objectives for aesthetics and quality

We aim to offer audiences a smooth online experience of multiple artistic actions in diverse ecosystems being visible all at the same time, alongside an expressive live soundscape. We present the performance in ‘gallery view’ highlighting the unity of beings across the world and synchronicities of simultaneous activity - a departure from individualistic art presentation. The screen is filled with trees and landscapes in different continents, creating a microcosm of planetary life. The audience can pin selected artists and focus on a chosen work or action, gaining interactive agency.

The performance’s gradual unfolding over an hour offers an immersive arts experience, and a sense of community with participating artists and other attendees who communicate via chat. The event provides a sense of being in nature for those unable to physically experience it due to access reasons and Covid restrictions.

Participating artists gain a sense of peace and well-being from engaging with nature over sustained time and a sense of community with other artists. All have the opportunity to listen and respond to the live soundscape, uniting them over distance, offering a sense of being part of a collaborative work.

The project develops grassroots structures for art practitioners which offer visibility and support for underrepresented artists. Artists from across European nations have the opportunity to see and exchange practices and experiences with artists from other continents in a safe environment. Be-coming Tree organizes a postevent reflective gathering where artists meet, exchange feedback, share practice advice and contacts. By embedding tree donations in all transactions, Be-coming Tree is pointing to the need for systemic economic solutions, which bridge technology and ecology. The Project mirrors the Green Deal by fostering biodiversity through transnational collaboration, supporting plurality of artistic expressions due to openness to all genres.

Key objectives for inclusion

Be-coming Tree aims to:

Abolish economic barriers to artist participation by providing free participation, free media literacy training and artistic support.

Facilitate international communication by using shared movement and natural environments removing verbal language and cultural barriers facilitating deep communication.

Include marginalized, underrepresented individuals and communities by reaching out to LGBTQA, Black, Brown, indigenous, global south, neurodivergent and older artists. Our events have showcased work of large numbers of intersectional artists including LGBTQA artists, artists with refugee status and neurodivergence.

Stimulate inclusion of artists isolated by Covid and ongoing travel restrictions through the use of barefoot tech (smart phones, WiFi, free Zoom account).

Offer digital literacy for older non-digital native artists through hands-on training in use of accessible technology and online platforms which generate inclusion in the digital world. By demystifying digital processes, we facilitate creation and sharing of work online and via live streaming.

Spread global and ecological ethics by linking artists and audiences across continents, sense of world community and increasing audiences and artists each event.

Mirror the invigorating quality and richness of biodiversity by including and representing multiple genres and disciplines.

Create new online audiences for (Live) Eco Ar via promotion of events to non-arts audiences interested in ecology and non eco audiences interested in art.

Support the creation of new artistic formats via annual, seasonal performances and art writing (Live response online blogs).

Develop the wisdom of project organisers’ lived experiences of marginalisation due to social, health and economic reasons and use these as a driving force for inclusion and social cohesion.

Results in relation to category

Be-coming Tree has been a labour of love, on a voluntary basis, out of an urgency to re-act to dramatic increase of social and economic bias due to Covid pandemic coupled with challenges of climate change, environmental degradation and ecocide. The effort has been awarded with an Awesome Without Borders mini grant that was used to create our inspirational website and online platform http://becomingtree.live/. Be-coming Tree was also one of the shortlisted projects for the CHWA Climate change Award due to our impact on re-wilding current art infrastructures and promoting tropical reforestation.

Over 100 international artists have actively participated in Be-coming Tree Live Art events or online art and poetry exhibitions/showcases via Facebook. Over 600 audience members from Europe and beyond have experienced these events, participated in tropical reforestation, developed agency to “be-come” a restorer species, promoting gift economies and altruistic mindsets, sowing positive change and enhancing the quality of life of all living beings.

Live artists found themselves without opportunities to perform during Covid and were faced with serious economic and creative hardship. Be-coming Tree offered a global showcase platform wherein to produce and share work while learning the use of new digital tools for self-promotion and an expansion of creative possibilities. Artists become part of a global ecoart community with whom to exchange practices, links, experiences for mutual growth and benefit.

The project is diversifying the monoculture seen in art and the natural environment at all levels. It is creating a global, transnational community grounded in pluralism, bottom-up practices and inclusivity that transcends the human, to embrace and encompass all beings as kin, where human and more-than-human are equally represented within a post-anthropocene, interspecies perspective.

How Citizens benefit

Citizens have been involved in the project as artists and as audiences. We have been in constant dialogue with artists throughout project development, and been vigilant of and responsive to audience issues, including those of access. Artist and audience feedback has influenced ensuing events and the project as a whole. Project evaluations have fed directly back into the next event enhancing our communicative skills, our own, artists’ and audiences’ digital learning, and inclusion.

Artists have participated via hour-long durational live streamed engagements with trees. Their questioning of our technical instructions has evolved the project’s clarity of instruction to create comprehensive, easily understood guidelines for creating live streamed collective performance. Older artists have considerably added to our expertise in this, enabling Be-coming Tree to become of value to non-digital natives. Increased requests to participate from artists have caused Be-coming Tree to grow from a 1hr performance to 2 x 1hr hour performances and then 3. We will continue to expand as demand increases, and are keen to decentralize the operation to different European and international hubs as the project grows.

We have carefully monitored audience reactions to the performances in terms of ease of online access and enjoyment, via their comments in the chat and responses to feedback forms. We tried using Zoom Webinar to simplify our process of artist and audience visibility settings in events. We showed the performance in ‘gallery view’ and audience members complained that they could not ‘pin’ artists to gain individual focus. Due to this we returned to using Zoom Meetings to give audiences this facility and sense of interactive agency. We responded to audience requests to know who each artist was during the event by sending them a media kit including details of each artist, their location and links, making this a richer audience experience and giving artists more visibility.

Innovative character

The roots and branches of Be-coming Tree are growing through and across the infrastructure of Brexit and Fortress Europe, making space for a new ecological grounding based on politics of care, radical inclusivity, global solidarity (kinship) and interspecies reciprocity.

The sheer number of intersectional and other artists involved in a one hour performance takes full advantage of new possibilities offered by accessible technologies. By showing all artists simultaneously in ‘hive view’ we sidestep old expectations of any one person having a starring role, and instead encourage new ways of experiencing art where each artist forms a part of the whole, which can be echoed by society to encourage planetary harmony and even help ensure humanity’s survival. Trees and nature are on an equal footing with the artists as creative collaborators, innovation catalysts and agents of beauty.

We support cross-cultural, transnational cooperation and networking by highlighting the collective nature of the work. The default view is one that presents a multitude of artists engaging simultaneously in local environments encouraging a new way of looking at art and artists. Each artist is an equal part of the whole, reflecting ways forward for society as a whole to ensure survival, and encourage planetary harmony. Be-coming Tree live-streamed activities can be easily accessed from domestic and work environments widening engagement for those experiencing physical restrictions.

Be-coming Tree links creative expression directly with locally managed reforestation. Taking inspiration from nature and giving back to nature/trees, creating a sustainable, self-feeding or self-sufficient loop. A pay-what-you-can “trees-for-tickets” system embeds donations for planting rainforest trees into every payment, opening the way to more circular, sustainable and affordable models of economy in service to environmental recovery.