Verde y Carmelita / Work in Progress

NYC 2022-2023

María P. Vila and Aurora de Armendi

After two years of a global pandemic, having experienced isolation from local communities we as artists, seek to collectively and move from a state of alienation to one of communion with nature. 

This project is a collaboration between Aurora de Armendi and Maria Luisa Portuondo Vila. It consists of spending time at different trails in New York during the year 2022-2023 to study trees and their root system. We will investigate how trees communicate with each other via mycorrhizal networks and the process of decomposition and auto-regeneration provided by fungi. 

We want to start the project by coming up with questions which will be divided into different categories pertaining to both the human and ecological issues we are facing today. Through this process of finding answers via both the knowledge gathered with scientists as well as from the intuitive dialogue with life in the forest, mostly trees and fungi; we will form an archive of mixed media and creative writing. It is our intention to develop an experimental language, following a non anthropocentric logic, to co-create a work that could provide a reunion with our ancestral wisdom and the existence of an inter-species collective memory.

This Project is supported by The New York State Council on Arts and The Hispanic Society in NYC

Intrauterine Dialogues / Maria Luisa, 2023