The fear is related to the forest, not the plants. This feeling is very old, it goes back to Roman civilization. For the Romans, the forest was the place of the “stranger”: It was in the forest that the barbarians hid. Moreover, the French word “forêt” [forest] comes from the Latin foris, which means “outside”. In English, the word “foreign” refers to what you don’t know, that which is far away. It may be due to the ecological legacy of antiquity that the tree continues to be considered a material for trade, which is not very commendable. We have remained within this fear of the forest and the desire to sell wood.
Francis Halle, A Life drawing trees, Interview with Emmanuele Coccia # 6
Why do you fear the forest?
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
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- But who really owns land and nature? Humans have no more self-evident rights than grass, trees, and squirrels, not to speak of fungi and bacteria. Property, the conceit that state-backed human social relations give us absolute rights over things, does not go far in the realms of land and nature, wh …
# 3
Giovanni Ambrosio. Please do not show my face. Chapter: Thresholds. Untitled.
Every image in the Alterlibrary collection is intended as a quote, an excerpt of a larger discourse. But every image also stands as a matter that could undergo a series of operations and alterations. Therefore, images are renewable sources.
Operations: Extraction and Collection. Image alteration: none.
This is an original photographic image extracted from my series called Please do not show my face. It is a collection of photographs divided into six chapters. All images have been shot in Calais and Dunkerque migration camps, across the cities and in the so-called jungles. Please do not show my face is not a documentary series on migration or migrants (but no one can control how images can collect arguments)—this work aims mainly to be an essay on the concept of the gaze. In using documentary photography materials, it interrogates the boundaries of visibility, authorship, and power of representation.
In the chapter devoted to thresholds, each image probes the notion of a threshold as a political act for those possessing the means of representation, compelling us to ask how far we can—or should—go in portraying others. Simultaneously, migration—moving from one place, status, or idea to another—is inextricably linked to thresholds and is never neutral: having, or being denied, the power to cross them determines who can move freely and who remains excluded.
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- We would ask to transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (cité) belongs to the state, as in a developing Europe or in international juridical structures still dominated by the inviolable rule of state sovereignty […] This should no longer be the ultimate horizon for citie …
of our Imagination
