The Forest Beneath Your Feet: Caterina Verde
More and more, I am taken by the sheer will of humankind to repress and force nature underfoot. Out of our way. Every day I think about this as I walk through my neighborhood where only tiny remnants of forest remain, seeing the bits and pieces lying in wait for the next move, for that moment when we humans lose our concentration, our will, and life can jump back to its proper place. Why am I surprised? It’s nothing new, but still, the sheer magnitude of will is impressive. Under the guise of practicality, we acquiesce to the task of repression. That’s how coercion works.
Waiting forest: Fungi growing on a tree stump with yellow object to draw your attention. Willful disregard, I guess we could call it.
The other thing I notice is that after everything has been paved over, for example, in an urban mall setting, a bank or some such business will come along and spend a fortune landscaping around their building, to denote wealth and ease. Meanwhile, the neighborhood inhabitants have to travel across a barren landscape to get to a market while the forest is already under our feet and it will grow freely, for all to enjoy if allowed to. There seems to be a penchant for conquering in our kind and then we wonder why we are depressed, or feeling anxious. Even in the urban landscape, why should we have to travel by subway to a park? Why are trees relegated to a small segment of the sidewalk, and expected to work on our behalf, cleaning the filthy air and offering us shade only to be squeezed by an idea of how large they should be. A tiny square of space is allocated. It really is so metaphoric for ourselves and what we accept.
Street Tree. What a tree must endure. 2021
Street Tree II, 2022
At the end of 2021, I did an interview with Brainard Carey about my installation and ongoing project, Inside Remote Viewing and the Recreational Vehicle on his radio show, The Museum of Non-Visible Art for Yale University Radio. During that interview, the question of the forest under your feet arose and so arises the connectedness of these two topics.
Installation view of, Inside Remote Viewing and the Recreational Vehicle. A three-channel project presented in Ridgewood, Queens in Autumn 2021.
Remote Viewing was the codename for the government project aimed at using psychic phenomena for spying purposes. It lasted from the early seventies to the early nineties.
Recreational Vehicle is the vehicle that we inhabit; the mobile unit; our body. The RV as the great American escape is now the new retirement plan for many. Americans are crisscrossing their way across land that they think is theirs.
Scene from Part II, The Soil is Languid of Remote Viewing and the Recreational Vehicle: an 8 part video work in progress.
Remote Viewing and Recreational Vehicle as an ongoing project was last presented as a three-channel video installation. However, the overall project includes drawings, texts, and photographs and the final video component will probably be about 40 minutes long.
I started working on the parent project around 2017, though some of the footage is from much earlier on. An earlier title for the work was Mapping Inconsequence. I’d started by considering how so much of what we live is overlooked. Paradoxically since GPS has taken over, guiding us and capturing us, the minutiae of our lives are seemingly under a microscope, in stasis, an immobilized view from space. Yet the details are still somehow absent due to information overload.
Cinematica for Remote Viewer, 2016, edition of 30, 13 x 19 inches
Over time, I am building the narrative by interweaving declassified texts from the CIA website with my own writings. These don’t necessarily fall in line with the idea of a linear storyline. But I am pursuing the idea of a fairy tale to merge with lines that we say to ourselves as they become our invisible mantras, such as the stories we tell that become part of the societal narrative. I’ll leave it at that for now.
Fallen Person, 2017, limited edition print of 3, 48 x 36 inches.
Flag for a Martian Landscape, 2021, print edition of 5, 24 x 36 inches.
You can read the essay about the installation, Inside Remote Viewing and the Recreational Vehicle by downloading the pdf here or by clicking on the image above.
Given that what we see is only a small fragment of what exists, the invisible realm is probably the most obvious thing in our existence. The black hole is unseen until a telescope sees it swallowing up an entire galaxy. So to talk about the invisible is to talk about the majority.
Caterina Verde
La Chambre Verte, 2018, print edition of 3, 24 x 36 inches
“It’s a great feeling to be lost.”
anonymous remote viewer
Interview on Inside Remote Viewing and the Recreational Vehicle on Brainard Carey’s radio show, The Museum of Non-Visible Art for Yale University Radio.
more on remote viewing wikipedia
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