Strolling through ‘Arboretum’: In what language does a forest cry?

If you try, there are at least a hundred ways to look at a tree.

1. You can gaze it like an object;

2. admire it as a subject;

3. really see it as an equal;

4. be annoyed at its suppleness;

5. look at its gentle dance;

6. notice its polyphonies;

7. spy on its humour;

8. clock its rage;

9. sight the tree’s deceptive androgyny;

10. behold its majesty;

11. be stunned at its crown’s shyness;

12. set eyes on the living-systems it’s friends with;

13. catch it mid-gossip with other trees;

14. be solaced by its sturdy comfort;

15. rest under its canopy;

16. swing in its branches;

17. indulge your kleptomania with its fruits;

18. be seduced by its effortless floral gifts;

19. soothe yourself with its sap;

20. see how it feeds a whole community;

21. ascertain its infinite liveliness;

22. inquire if it’s parched;

23. tend to its bleeds;

24. investigate its boundaries;

25. gaze at its sweets and bitters;

26. spot its silent luminosity;

27. bathe in its light;

28. witness its silent rebellion;

29. heal with its medicinality;

30. stretch with its respiring wisdom;

31. acknowledge it as an archive-keeper;

32. soak in the hives it supports;

33. notice how it homes its winged neighbours;

34. supplicate for some rest;

35. be hypnotised by its fighting spirit;

36. enjoy its verses;

37. bask in its impressionism;

38. watch it pray to the skies;

39. commend its secular love;

40. adore its improvisations;

41. catch it play hide and seek with the sun;

42. see it as the jungle gym for the curious;

43. copy how it changes its wardrobe;

44. cherish its love for spring;

45. learn its autumnal r&r routine;

46. fancy its clockwork;

47. envy its status as the sky’s umbrella;

48. giggle at how it beats all living philosophers;

49. get lost in its time capsule;

50. watch it be the breathing sculptor;

51. see it weave the earth’s loom;

52. walk into mobile museum it is;

53. browse through its collectibles;

54. listen to its whispers;

55. let it cast a spell on you;

56. tail its magical thinking;

57. gape at its sentinel qualities;

58. peer at its architectural marvels;

59. embrace its stem;

60. gawk at its pottery wheel;

61. ogle at it quenching its thirst;

62. stare at the earth’s watchtower;

63. consult the living historian;

64. nap on its quilt;

65. picnic under its baldachin;

66. make a garland with its flowers;

67. learn to read labels;

68. buy less, reuse more;

69. forage for fallen branches;

70. climb the earth’s staircase;

71. count its rings;

72. be protected by this mighty parasol;

73. listen to it symphonic rustle;

74. watch it withstand storms;

75. hear it sing to the rain gods;

76. scan its sunlit tapestry;

77. breathe in its fresh air;

78. meditate in the cathedral it is;

79. be anchored by it;

80. centre yourself with its shade;

81. borrow its arboreal wisdom;

82. tune into its fables;

83. solve the puzzle it is;

84. run through labyrinth;

85. consult its clairvoyance;

86. flow with its circadian rhythm;

87. praise its solipsism;

88. admire its fine lines;

89. mimic its forgiveness;

90. lay on its hips;

91. watch it put Pantone to shame;

92. admire its diet;

93. dote on frame;

94. cherish its grandiosity;

95. map its underlands;

96. plant its seeds;

97. prune, not butcher it;

98. mourn its ancestors;

99. demonstrate against its falling;

100. educate, agitate, organise against deforestation.

In our hyper-consumerist age, where most of us with access to modern technology are doomscrolling on our screens at an average speed and attention span of 4.1 seconds per moving image, the painter duo Thukral and Tagra’s latest art show Arboretum ask us to take a rude pause. One we didn’t prepare for, one we didn’t anticipate, one we cannot look away from. Just a breath. A breath away from the Silicon-Valley-and-Bengaluru-led capture of the entirety of our lives towards letting our minds wander.

The last time we allowed our bodies to loiter aimlessly or let our minds wander toward unplanned directions is probably now a distant memory. An instinct killed. A habit forgotten. Guilt-ridden is the modern human when wandering aimlessly in cycles of regret about time wasted, time that was unproductive, time that belonged to someone else. Arboretum insists we take back our right to wander, to gaze at what is right before our eyes, to which we have all along shown inattentive blindness.

Arboretum is a call to action. A call to shinrin-yoku, to reconnect with our biosphere, our local agro-ecologies. To engage with forest systems and bathe in them. To go offline and lick our wounds of the modern age. To knit a quilt with our tangled labyrinthian thoughts. To pick up a basket, a pair of scissors and go foraging for leaves and flowers, and come back to make the wildest of flower arrangements. Instead of eating our feelings, drowning them with stabilisers, relaxants, anxiolytics, and tranquilisers, this collection allows us to sit with them and take refuge in the echoes of systems that nourish us.

The labour it takes to reclaim and design our own notions of time is an ethic in durationality. The vortex of working with screens, mediating leisure with flat screens, living pixel to pixel harvested as big data, the near simulations of our collective selves and communities have de-sensitised us to ecologies that feed and nurse us. We shop online, we work online, we bank online, find humour online, discover and participate in culture online, find and keep friendships online; future wars too will be virtual, we’re told; we date and fall in love online, we live and nearly die online. A recognition of the consistent, continual and constant always-already ongoing assault on our attention economies is where we can start.

The ability to be fully present in an act of deep listening or to hold our gaze at the majesty of an urban botanical garden or a sacred grove is an act of resistance one must hone, relearn and nurture. Going offline for a day, a few hours even is already a radical divorce from the extremely online, extremely available, and extremely real-time nature of our interconnected lives. This totality of the assault on our senses, our attention, our ability to imagine leisure outside of sophisticated algorithmic and virtual realties is but a choice.

Arboretum is a prayer for rest. It’s not an avowed gospel hymn to turn away from the horrors of our age. It isn’t the locking up of our interconnected selves into islandic ivory towers. It isn’t sanitised agronomy of self-loathing and narcissism of the petty bourgeoisie. It isn’t the art world’s perennial allergy to the political. At the heart of these canvases are grasslands of care. The paintings are a product of seeking and sharing refuge. Refuge from the relentless assault on people’s freedoms; a refuge from the burnout of keeping tabs on democratic dissent; refuge from our jaded selves that need to loaf and unbend. Thukral and Tagra remind us that care for the self and community is just as political as showing up to a rally, platforming the disenfranchised, fundraising or retweeting something that moves you.

And yet, the ability to disengage, to go off the grid – if you will – is but a luxury. An option. A crack of light in a window. Towards the politics of the possible. It is agency. One many communities who live in prison-like and camp-like conditions right in our backyards do not have. One we cannot take for granted.

The Rohingyas remain stateless, homeless, nameless and sub-human at the hands of a militarised, apartheid state. Special thanks to Meta with its documented role in the spreading of fake news at the height of the genocide of Rohingyas.

The information blackout in Kashmir in the lead-up to the abrogation of Article 370 has been seen as no less than the old school art of war, the garden variety.

When the latest iteration of the Nakba began in Gaza in October 2023, the first thing Israel felled were communication towers, disabling mobile telephony and the internet. A complete and total blackout. All dispatches stopped. Journalists went AWOL. Only single ticks. A war technique used ever so often in many societies in South Asia. Communities deemed either infiltrator, pests, antinational, urban naxal, extremist, separatist, rioters, Khalistani and other fictions. When feudal, patriarchal parents in India suspect a young daughter to be in love with those outside their gotra, caste or with a – heavens forbid – a “love jihadi”, the first thing a young woman in Savarna India is deprived of is her smart phone. Her window to the outside world. Her arboretum.

As Israel’s illegal war and occupation of Gaza continues, charred Palestinian bodies stopped appearing on our screens. We saw fewer and fewer images of mutilated children, burnt hospitals, fallen homes, trees, carbonised gardens, and entire cities blown up into rubble, ash, bones and missing footwear on our feeds. Meta formally abetted an information blackout before the actual blackout. So much for its sleek aesthetic; hashtag no filter, no masks. All unmasked right before our eyes.

As long as there are enough cute cat videos and memes to scroll through, the genocide can be too triggering for habitual forest-bathers and sourdough enthusiasts. By December 2023, The Guardian reported, Gazans had run out of the last standing trees to burn as firewood to cook and stay warm. They resorted to burning remnants of furniture, doors and walking miles for a scrap of clay and wood.

The olive trees of Gaza are now gone. What sort of landscaping will Israel engage in when they take their Zionist project of occupation to its final conclusion? What plants and trees will grow in what was once Gaza? Turns out, ironically, the oppressed and oppressor share an equal amount of love for the olive. In January, Netanyahu planted olive trees near Gaza to celebrate Tu Bishvat – the Jewish New Year for Trees. Several of his tree planting press releases ironically quote him saying “A proper response to terror is to uproot the terror and plant our own roots deep in our land.”

While the olive has been claimed as Israel’s national tree, even as it had close contenders like the palm, terebinth, cypress, Mount Tabor oak, fig and eucalyptus to choose from. Israel has often used botanical metaphors when describing their genocide in Gaza such as “mowing the lawns” or “mowing the grass”.

In Nazi Germany, too, great emphasis was placed on gardening, manicured lawns, the strictest of pruning and weeding out of uninvited growth in accordance with Aryan laws. Designing and controlling nature’s wild characteristic. One of the tasks Jewish camp prisoners were assigned was converting dry, marshy, arid lands into fertile, agricultural soil. The project of horticultural fascism.

In the 2023 movie The Zone of Interest, the protagonist Hedwig Höss, essayed by the electric Sandra Hüller, is an avid gardener. She builds her own paradise of exotic flowers, an orchard of the juiciest of fruits and an enviable vineyard right next to Auschwitz, where her husband is the chief commander. This is, of course, with slave labour of camp prisoners who tend to her garden.

In his (hopefully only) term as US president, Donald Trump, a rabid climate-changer-denier and flat-earther, announced a global commitment to plan a trillion trees. Whether to mitigate the effects of climate emergency or just for thrills and chills, he didn’t care to mention. The banality of evil is perfectly compatible with botanical joys and fantasies. Many an arboretum are built for the pleasures of great dictators. The two are not irreconcilable.

Firewood aside, trees are living archive-keepers of our times, of empires fallen, of peoples liquidated, of cultures no more alive, of planetary memories, of disasters that eliminated civilisations. Reports suggest all life from Gaza has nearly been eliminated, all its flora bombed. The Atlantic reported details how scientists who have carbon-dated the oldest living baobab trees that are thousands of years old are noticing them dying all in quick succession.

As our cities and towns become more and more unliveable, landscapers, botanists and town planners are already busy – we’re told – studying drought-resilient species of trees that may or may not survive extreme heat waves as the planet gets warmer and warmer. Just this summer, the Mashco Piro people, an Amazonian tribe previously never sighted, was ousted from the forests to the river shore as forest-felling contracts to logging companies in Peru were finally actioned. In the last three years – for two of which we were squared up in our homes in a raging pandemic that ravaged lives –India lost a whopping 2.33 million hectares of tree cover in its primary forests, the size of the entire state of Meghalaya. In how many languages does a forest cry?

A burning question plaguing the scientific community right now is: what will the planet eat in the coming decades? As we run of food and drinking water, our essential knowledge systems and heterogenous crops disappear at the altar of monocultures, as the Earth sprints toward man-made sterility, Californian startups’ contribution to this anxiety is – believe it or not – 3D-printed-burgers and plant-based-meats.

The sped up anthropogenic age and the doors of climate emergency that we have burst open are killing the oldest living trees on earth and with them planetary archives and knowledge systems. Very soon, we won’t have to raze down forests. They are already dying. The bark beetle is slowly making its way East, having already feasted on entire forest systems in American woodlands and dry forests of Australia. Every year, we read of ecophysiologists being stumped with their jaws fallen to learn of assemblages of resilient trees disappearing from our maps. How do we mourn these disappearing forests?

What sort of arboretums do we want to build and take a stroll in? For starters, we will need to relearn technologies of seeing. We’ll need to examine the two parallel lines of the world’s gaze at us and our gaze outwards. Whether we can find a rhythm, a dance, a tune between these cosmologies is our labour of landscaping. In How to Do Nothing, Jenny Odell makes a compelling case for us to engage with our biosphere again in order to resist the attention economies. That’s where we start. For starters, I’d ask how do you really look at a tree? In what language does a forest cry? Our work has only just begun.

Arboretum: Ebb and Flow by Thukral and Tagra is on at Nature Morte Gallery, Colaba

Chirag Thakkar is publisher, writer and editor based in New Delhi.