MOTHER TREES OF FORESTS NOT YET HERE

Mother Trees of Forests Not Yet Here is a project about material exchange between species across long spans of time. It searches for forms of care that can be transmitted into the uncertain future by building relationships between species, particularly long lived trees through which we can reach past the limits of an individual human life.

“Mother Tree” is a term, from Canadian scientist Suzanne Simard, for the oldest and largest trees in a forest. The mother trees distribute resources to younger and weaker trees through underground networks of mycorrhizal fungi. But the term in the title also refers to the act of tending to what is young now, in anticipation of its future forms, an act of care for who or what is not yet here.

Centred around a performative lecture, a meal shared between people and seedlings, and a public planting of young fruit nut trees, the project prepares for future scarcity by developing porous relationships of mutual care in the present. By tracing the way elements move from animal body to arboreal body and back then forth again, the project builds an avenue—both speculative and literal—for extending care into the future. In the simplest way, the young trees are tended to in the present with the hope that they may in turn sustain who (or what) will come in the future. The project is also a collective imaginative exercise in noticing how the ways we imagine future scarcity shapes relationships in the present.