Some time ago I read an entertaining account of old trees, Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees by Jared Farmer. When I look back I don’t remember many details, except my impression that the book was very much focused on the US, which is understandable, or rather something I have learned to expect. The names of the chapters give an idea of the scope of the critically and entertainingly written book: Prologue, Introduction, Venerable Species,Memento Mori, Monuments of Nature, Pacific Fires, Circles and Lines, Oldest Known, Latest Oldest, Time to Mourn, Epilogue.
 
The first corner I have turned, on page 113, deals with German forest policy in the 19th century: “… the contradiction between forestry and forest-mindedness was partially resolved through the protection of “remarkable trees”, the inverse of “normal trees”. While the forest engineers segregated timber into age cohorts, they marked extraordinary specimens on their cadastral maps and placed stones around them – relicts to be preserved in the midst of rationalisation.” (Farmer 2022, 113) Farmer mentions that ‘remarkable’ first meant “freak forms of growth” but would soon come to mean “the biggest, the oldest, the most historic – trees associated with kings, or Luther, or Goethe, and ideally situated near spas and hiking paths.” (ibid.) This was of course interesting to think about after completing a two-year project called Meetings with Remarkable and Unremarkable Trees not that long ago.
 
There is much talk about dendrochronology, tree rings and the search for the oldest tree in the world, usually a pine, but I have turned my next corner only more than hundred pages later. That is because junipers, my current performing partners, are mentioned. “When piñons and junipers expire their deaths don’t attract the same media attention as do lone trees or tall trees.” Moreover: In Utah and other western US states, ranchers and land managers continue to ‘chain’ junipers – kill them by dragging a heavy anchor chain between two bulldozers – thus encouraging the growth of annual grasses grazed by beef cattle.” (Farmer 2022, 270)
 
A familiar name pops up a little later, namely Pando, the huge aspen forest, which is actually one cloned individual, “a forest of one”, near Fishlake plateau in Utah. It is a candidate for the largest organism in the world, and supposed to be 80.000 years old. And in the same context there is a brief account of the Swedish spruce clone, Old Tjikko, which I have visited myself in 2019 and thought to be 11.000 years old, standing there since the ice-age. Farmer notes that a professor at Umeå University named the ancient clone Old Tjikko after his beloved departed dog and mentions the finding of a 9.550 year old piece of wood on the site as the only rather insubstantial evidence. He also mentions a book by a brooklyn-based photographer Rachel Sussman, The Oldest Living Thing in the World (2014), new to me. (Farmer 2022, 290-293) Farmer notes that “it’s current high ranking Google searches for the oldest living thing is less about botany than the never ending search for symbols. The latest oldest is a mobile site where the modern fetish for the new and the novel meets the modern fetish for the ancient and the original.” (Famrer 2022, 293)
 
Well, what other ways of being remarkable could make more sense?
 
 
Farmer, Jared (2022) Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees Picador 2022
 
 
 

The book by Olivia Laing, The Lonely City from 2016 is perhaps not the first book one thinks of as a source for research notes, but it is as much about art as about the city of New York or loneliness, or rather a few artists like Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, the outsider artist Henry Darger, the singer Klaus Nomi and the internet entrepreneur Josh Harris. And with them their times, including the AIDS epidemic, ACT UP and so on. It was fascinating to read about a time I have witnessed myself, and remember parts of, like the sudden international fame of Klaus Nomi. My short visit to New York in the 1980’s when Nina von Svetlich and Anja Salmela, who later died of AIDS together with her husband, lived there in east village, and then some years later when Roi Vaara performed with Black Market International in Franklin Furnace, left only superficial impressions. Enough to enjoy the book, though, which is written in a personal confession style, but includes analysis of cultural politics, social media and queer resistance and is stimulating on many levels. What I remember best, perhaps, from the end of the book, is the idea of collage and stitching things together as a remedy for loneliness or isolation or the feeling of things falling apart. And also the general idea of art as a remedy for various ailments, like loneliness or isolation or racism and humiliation etc. Of course I started to wonder whether I am lonely, or perhaps so used to being alone that I do not recognise it as loneliness… The book, which is now translated to Finnish and was recommended to me by Eija-Liisa, is well worth reading in any case.
 
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City – Adventures in the art of being alone Canongate books, Edinburgh 2017.
 
 

This thought provoking book – The New Wild by Francis Pearce – is already 10 years old, published in 2015, but feels fresh and provocative. Written by a journalist, easy to read, it makes its points clearly. So called invasive species are not the bad guys but the good guys who help restore what humans have destroyed. The book consists in three parts: Alien Empires (On Green Mountain, New Worlds, All at sea, Welcome to America, Britain: A Nation Tied in Knotweed), Myths and Demons (Ecological cleansing, Myths of the Aliens, Myths of the Pristine, Nativism in the Garden of Eden), and The New Wild (Novel Ecosystems, Rebooting Conservation in the Urban Badlands, Call of the New Wild).
 
Here are a few quotes that made me turn the corner of the page:
 
“Conservationists, it seems, are dedicated to protecting the weak and vulnerable, the endangered and the abused. Nature generally promotes the strong and the wily, the resilient and versatile.” (Pearce 2015, 102)
 
“All this [rinderpest and the development of national parks in Africa] tells us three things. Firs, of course, it tells about the danger of alien diseases in communities with no immunity – though I doubt that anything on the remotely similar scale still awaits unsuspecting ecosystems today. Second, it tells us that nature is good at growing back. Third, it shows us that our attitudes about pristine nature are often founded on false perceptions. Most of what we regard today as virgin wilderness is far from untouched by humans.” (Pearce 2015, 133)
 
“Conventional conservation … operates ‘on the grossly mistaken belief that we can halt ongoing extinctions, [which] fuels our preoccupation with saving relics and ghosts’. What conservationists should really be doing… is ‘turning our attention to the new assemblages of organisms that are emerging’ as a result of our activities.” (Pearce 2015, 160)
 
“Traditional wild lands – the old-growth forests and other historic habitats – will in the future be the places most dependent on human intervention for their survival. In a world of climate change, where the old wild is hemmed in by human activity, these ecosystem islands will increasingly resemble museum pieces, time capsules, and experimental labs for scientists. They will not be wild in any true sense. On the other hand, the novel ecosystems, the make-do-and-mend places, will be the ones able to stand on their own two feet. They will be the new wild. (Pearce 2015, 186)
 
I am not so sure about old-growth forests being museums that need human maintenance, human protection from logging for sure, but the argument for looking at all the new collaborations and hybridisations taking place when species from all over the world meet in semi-urban areas or ‘badlands’ is convincing. The strange new ecosystems developing in places destroyed, disturbed or abandoned by humans – and between them -surely are a new wild.
 
 
Fred Pearce, The New Wild – Why Invasive Species will be Nature's Salvation. Boston: Beacon Press 2015.
 
 
 

After reading the informative introduction to Göze Saner’s book Practicing Archetype – Solo Performer Training as Critical Pedagogy. (2025) I was overcome by memories from my basic training in theatre and the debates and controversies at that time, which the book now illuminates in a new light. I was also surprised that I had never thought of my current performances for camera with trees as solo performances nor as ‘work on the self’, or as Saner suggests, ‘encounters with the self’. This is probably due to the fact that my primary education is in directing, not acting, and my identity is not that of a performer, so the idea of ‘training’ is not so prominent. And all the years of teaching performance art in an environment of dance and theatre, emphasising the need to make a distinction to those ‘crafts’, have of course left their mark, too. The real effort in traditional performance art is to do an action once, and to show the effort, as opposed to repeating an action in a way that it seems effortless or as if made for the first time, and so on. After reading the introduction I am fascinated by the idea of looking at my practice through the lens of solo performance, maybe even work on the self, actually, as suggested by the subtitle of the book, Solo Performer Training as Critical Pedagogy.
 
The subtitles in the introduction give an idea of the breadth thoroughness of the contextualisations. She discusses first the notion of self in sections titled The Self in Performer Training, including Work on Self and Critical Reflective Practice; Configuring the Self; Self-Configuring; Encounters with Self; Therapeutic and Liberatory Practices of Self; Work on Self as an End in Itself; The Laboratory of Self /Selves. Then she treats the notion of solo performance in Solo Performance, including Solo (as) Pedagogy; What is Solo Performance?; Solo Political Actions, Solo Audiences, Solo Selves; Solo Imaginings, and further Solo Questions: Presence, Identity, Action; Training (for) Solo; Solo Problems; Solo Performer Training as Critical Pedagogy. After that she turns to he notion of archetype in Practicing Archetype: A Methodology, A brief history of acting and psychology, Acting and the Collective Unconscious, Archetype and Coloniality, Repairing Multiplicity in Archetypal Psychology, Archetypal Image, Engaging Archetypally, Decolonising Archetypes, Encounters with Self as a Critical Liberatory Practice of Archetypes. The introduction ends with section on My Background, Audio Practice, and Instructionality. And this was just the beginning. The main chapters are devoted to three archetypal figures, Echo, Odysseus and Sisyfos. 1. Conversations with Echo: A Political Pedagogy of Presence (or, Teaching Presence is Political), 2.Interviews with Odysseus: (Dis)orienting Identities
in Training, 3. Pushing a Stone with Sisyphus: Action, Repetition,
and Difference, and finally the Conclusion: A Critical, Archetypal, and Liberatory Solo Performer Training.
 
She writes: “In Practicing Archetype, using presence, identity, and action as my points of focus, I disrupt the binary thinking that separates inner and outer realms in psychophysical training regimes, and use an ‘ideologically aware’ approach to reconfigure embodied forms of research into the self in all its fragmented and interrelated multiplicities, and as part of fragmented and multiple relationships with others.” (saner 2025, 10) She condenses a key part of her theoretical context as follows: “Drawing on a methodology that connects the fluid and precise poststructuralist understanding of archetype proposed in archetypal psychology (Berry 1982, Hillman 1977, 1983, 1992, 1995, 2005) with the interconnected understanding of self and community, as can be found in liberation psychology (Afuape 2011; Afuape and Hughes 2016; Martín-Baró 1994; Watkins and Shulman 2008), I examine solo performer pedagogy as a liberatory space for investigating the cross-sections of the personal and the political in one’s own body, mind, psyche, and relationships and, in doing so, modelling an accessible critical reflective embodied practice.” (Saner 2025, 3-4) None of these specific discussions within psychology are known to me, whereas the conversations related to laboratory theatre or actor training seem more familiar, although I have not followed recent developments.
 
In the very beginning Saner concretises her understanding of presence, identity and action for the performer, when she writes: “the archetypal figures Echo, Odysseus, and Sisyphus … help me organise my thinking ontologically in a way that interlinks solo performance and solo performer training around three questions, each addressed in a separate chapter: how, who, and what. /–/ The first question, how, is with regard to presence – how a solo performer holds the attention of an audience or how a performer in training learns to make an appearance. The second question asks who, or what identity, role, mask, character, or self a performer becomes, embodies, indicates, or plays in a solo performance and how her training prepares her to undergo such characterisation processes. And finally, the question what, addresses what a solo performer does, in performance and in training.” (Saner 2025, 3)
 
She later notes how the “three questions or problems I identified earlier, presence, identity, and action, propose a map for interrogating the individual-collective dynamic through embodied forms of solo training. They indicate the relational perspectives from which the self can be observed, studied, and articulated within actor training: the self as a kind of being there, the self as an identifying, and the self as a doing.” (Saner 2025, 39) Later she explains: “Echo, who perishes as a body and remains pure vocal resonance, speaks to me about the actor’s presence. Odysseus, who tells stories under many guises to many different audiences, offers wisdom on how the actor can navigate with and around questions of identity. Sisyphus teaches repetition and difference, lectures on habit, memory, behaviour and action, and hints towards lessons on freedom and liberatory acts. /–/ In the rhizomatic understanding of archetype … every engagement with repetition in training, theatre, or life, enacts Sisyphus; every (re)telling of a story with a specific audience performs Odysseus; every presence that reveals a new space recalls Echo.” (Saner 2025, 57)
 
The questions of presence, identity and action would be interesting to think of in the context of my practice Talking with Trees, potentially a solo performance: how is presence generated in recorded unedited speech, who is performing, only the speaker or both of us, as well as what kind of action is undertaken by talking to a tree…
 
 
 
Göze Saner, PRACTICING ARCHETYPE – Solo Performer Training as Critical
Pedagogy, in the series Perspectives on Performer Training, Routledge 2025

The English title of the book by Baptiste Morizot that I just finished reading is Ways of Being Alive (Polity Press 2022, original French 2020). It is a wonderful mixture of many kinds of writing with a foreword by Richard Powers and an afterword by Alain Damasio, who presents a nice summary of the main arguments of the book. I’m not trying to do that, but will write down a few quotes that I stopped at for some reason. The titles of the chapters can give an idea of the spectrum of the book, which begins with wolf tracking: Introduction: The ecological crisis as a crisis in sensibility. Chapter One: A Season among the living. Chapter Two: The promises of a Sponge. Chapter Three: Cohabiting with our wild beasts. Chapter Four: To the other side of the night. Epilogue: Adjusted consideration.
The first quote is from chapter three, and I am not sure why I marked exactly this one:
“The problem of mesoethics comes down to reappropriating the power to transform the territory of life that transforms us. ‘Build the environment that builds you, modulate the environment that modulates you’: this is the inscription over the gate to the mesoethical path.
Diplomatic ethics is the permaculture of the self – not an intensive and interventionist agriculture practised on oneself: it is based on an understanding of the ecology of passions, a channeling, an irrigation and a potentiation of desires. ‘I’ am a permaculture forest-garden, where classical ethics wanted me to be an impeccable formal French garden, where romanticism fantasised about an English garden, and neoliberal morality demands that I be a bit of a high-yield monoculture.” (Morizot 2022, 155)
The other quote is from chapter four:
“More than appealing to the love of Nature, or brandishing the fear of the Apocalypse, it seems to me that one way, better adjusted to the challenges of the time, amounts to trying out many approaches, practices, types of language, processes, devices, and experiences that can make us feel and live from the point of view of interdependences. Make us feel and live as a living creature in the living world, also caught in the weft, sharing ascents and ways of being alive, a common destiny and a mutual vulnerability.” (Morizot 2022, 217)
And a third quote from the epilogue:
“By what specific aspects of animism, then, could we permit ourselves to be affected, when we are the heirs of a naturalist modernity (that cosmology which contrasts ‘Nature’ on one side with humans on the other)? It seems to me that the relationships between animists and animals, plants and rivers are of a kind to allow humans to make contact with non-humans, to allow a sustainable ‘commerce’ with them, in the old meaning of this word, which designates negotiated interaction, as peaceful and mutually beneficial as possible, in a cosmopolitan, contingent context, always at the risk of discord and conflict./–/ In animist cultures, the invariant of these relationships, what characterises them all, is not an abstract egalitarianism, but rather the fact that they always require consideration, even when hunting to kill and eat monkey, even with a so-called ‘pest’ animal, or with a raspberry bush or a grove of wild trees that we do not use. This is what we have lost and neglected in late modern dualism.” (Morizot 2022, 232-233)
And with that dualism he refers to the dualism of considering nature as a resource on the one hand and as sacred on the other, but also the distinction “between our moral relation towards people (ends in themselves) and instrumental relation towards everything else (means for ends in themselves).” (Morizot 2022, 237)
He ends his epilogue as follows: ” What must be reinvented by this is a cosmo-politeness: it’s a matter of rediscovering and inventing adjusted consideration for the other forms of life that make the world, so that we can at last be just a little bit cosmopolite.” (Morizot 2022, 241)
 
 
 

Summer is a good time to read books that otherwise pile up on tables and remain untouched. One such book that has been on top of the ‘recent acquisitions’ pile is Justin O’Connor’s Culture is not an Industry. I took it with me to Rovaniemi partly because it’s light weight paper, and read it while gallery sitting for the Gifts from the Sentient Forest exhibition in Villa Vinkkeli there. I did not underline specific paragraphs but I have turned the corners of pages as a mark to return to that page too many times. So what’s the book about? Basically it is a critical account of the trend to consider culture and art as part of the culture industry or the creative economies and why that strategy has failed, and should be replaced with an understanding of culture as a way of life and as part of essential social infrastructure. The chapters are titled Creative Industries, Culture goes missing, Necessity or luxury?, Culture and the Social foundations, Cultural infrastructures and Culture and economy. At the turn of the fist corner I read: “We have charted the move from culture as part of social citizenship to culture as consumer service industry. This is part of a wider shift to a market citizenship in which the social foundations – health, welfare, education, and basic infrastructural provision – have been commodified, privatised and outsourced.” (O’Connor 2024, 95). And the last page, with the last corner begins with: “Since the 1990’s, the global culture industry has become an integral part of global capitalism. Perhaps nowhere else in this system is the descriptor ‘neo-feudalism’ more apt, as huge cultural conglomerates and their avatars now have almost unchallenged power over the collective imagination of humanity.” (O’Connor 2024, 228) After a period of massive overproduction “the classic trajectory has now set in – glut, slump, lay-offs, elimination, more concentration.” (Ibid) As a solution he wants states to step in with regulations, breaking monopolies, socialising the databases, affirming that culture is not a commodity like any other, that culture is not an industry.
For me the book was instructive as a lesson in recent history of cultural politics and also as an updating of contemporary leftist thinking, which I am shamefully unaware of, like the debate regarding basic income versus basic services and other related topics.
 
 
O’Connor, Justin. Culture is not an Industry. Reclaiming art and culture for the common good. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press 2024.