Eternal Forest News in May 🍀
by Eternal Forest
An art experience and walk - the day of Fascination with Plants, 18 May, Porto
On May 18th, the International Museum Day is celebrated and, as usual, ping! and Galeria Municipal do Porto also celebrate the International Fascination of Plants Day. This year, the artist Evgenia Emets will guide a Walk through the Gardens resulting from a short residency she developed in the Gardens of Palácio de Cristal.
Based on the Eternal Forest project, focused on careful research into the connection between communities and the forest and the urgency of reflecting on these relationships, which are often based on extractive logic, the artist will show us the species of trees that exist here and propose a collective experience of writing from what the plants tell us while establishing relationships and stories behind each one of them.
This walk will be held in Portuguese language. Participation in this walk is free and limited to capacity. This event is booked out.
Eternal Forest recommends: Plant Consciousness, Monica Gagliano, 15 May, Lisbon
Human Entities 2024: culture in the age of artificial intelligence
Wed 15 May 2024, 6.30pm
Monica Gagliano’s pioneering scientific discoveries provide us with powerful evidence that plants possess forms of intelligence. Her latest book, Thus Spoke the Plant, is a 'phytobiography', or collection of stories written in partnership with plants, where she shares genuine first-hand accounts from her research into plant communication and cognition. Inspired by encounters with nature and indigenous elders from around the world, she looks beyond mechanistic explanations, and presents the need for a more unified worldview – one where science and spiritually complement each other.
Plant cognition is a new and exciting field of research directed at experimentally testing the cognitive abilities of plants, including perception, learning processes, memory and consciousness. This emerging framework holds considerable implications for the way we perceive the vegetal world as it redefines the traditionally held boundary between animals and plants. The novel concepts and perspectives arising from this research on vegetal life are galvanising a truly interdisciplinary dialogue across an array of academic disciplines, including science, philosophy, environmental law, literature and the arts.
Venue: Large Auditorium of the Faculty of Fine Arts (ULisboa), Largo da Academia Nacional de Belas Artes, 4 1249-058 Lisboa
Eternal Forest is part of the Sentient Forest cohort in Finland, 2024-2026
With joy, we share the news of joining the two-year cohort of Gifts from the Sentient Forest in Finland led by Dr John C. Ryan and Dr Francis Joy.
Bringing the ideas developed over the last 6 years at Eternal Forest to the forests in Finland, to a circle of researchers, artists and forest communicators, interested in exploring the guiding question: How can we access forest intelligence and sentience through creative practices?
‘Discover the wonder of the sentient forest. Immerse yourself in the natural and cultural heritage of Finnish Lapland. Connect with the spirits of the forest and learn techniques that foster creativity, imagination, and spirituality.’
Gifts from the Sentient Forest is a collaborative, international, and interdisciplinary research project involving the University of Lapland Arctic Centre, Finland, and Southern Cross University, Australia with support from the Kone Foundation, Finland, ‘In the Woods’ Funding Programme (2024-26).