TRANSLATING
TREES

Developed in response to Floating Land 2025: Escape Making, Translating Trees is a site-responsive performance presented as a guided walk across three locations. Combining performance, participation, and ecological listening, the work explores the possibility of communication between humans and trees.

The project emerged from a series of encounters in which the artist engaged individual trees in sustained conversation. These exchanges were later translated into spoken narratives that form the basis of the performance.

A hand-crafted costume incorporating psychedelic symbolism references altered states of perception and collective ways of knowing that exist outside dominant Western frameworks. Through the shared experience of walking, listening, and gathering, audiences are invited to consider how attention itself might become a form of relationship.

Responding to the theme of Escape Making, the work proposes trees as teachers in a time of ecological and social uncertainty. Having adapted, collaborated, and endured across hundreds of millions of years, trees offer a perspective that exceeds the scale of individual human lives and contemporary crises.

Positioned between performance, ecological practice, and the exploration of consciousness, the work asks what humanity might learn by listening differently to the living systems that surround us.

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