Blued Trees Goes to the Hague
Reflection on Witnessing and Representation Before 2025
When I was a small child, I was plagued by nightmares of enormous monsters pursuing me. I had no means at the time to understand the possible source of those dreams. We now know that epigenetic memories are real. I think the dream monsters that pursued me were the avatars of the real monsters that had pursued my parents as war refugees before my birth. I had intuitively internalized their nightmarish histories in Eastern Europe and Palestine. Arguably, that was my first experience of 4 dimensional space-time.
When I was still very young, in time the monsters morphed into small gangs of violent men chasing me. Out of desperation, I invented and taught myself lucid dreaming and before puberty, I was able to turn back to my pursuers, argue them down to calm and escape safely. A little later, I was able to not only protect myself in those dreamscapes, but others who were with me.
Throughout my life since then, I often turned to my dreams to solve problems with a firm, almost mystical belief in my own intuition and the power of my unconscious. It was intuition that sent me to Maine after a dream in 1989, and what convinced me to buy the town dump there and commence Ghost Nets. At the time, my intention was to ground myself in a site that felt like the ends of the American Earth, from which I might push back against the international tides of ecocide, particularly habitat degradation and climate change. Subsequently, intuition was what led me to detail my trigger point theory and write about it, first in my dissertation, "Trigger Point Theory As Aesthetic Activism," then in my work memoir, "Divining Chaos". Blued Trees emerged from that trajectory of experience and thinking.
The theme of escaping violence and turning it back on itself as an act of protection has been a dominant theme throughout my life. In retrospect, I would argue that violence against another is by its very nature, a narcissistic behavior, in so far as it precludes empathy for the Other. I explored many aspects of that theme in an extensive series of figurative paintings before moving to Maine. The process of witnessing, representing and externalizing what troubled me taught me a measure of wisdom about the tension between cruelty and compassion, whether between people or between people and the rest of nature that culminates in ecocide. It is why I have consistently returned to the concept that ecocide mirrors, writ large, narcissistic behavior in relationship to an Other.
In February 2025, Blued Trees will go to the Hague for exhibition. That event will culminate a ten-year long art project, that has been a pilgrimage to protect life from monsters, that really grew out of my childhood nightmares. I began this spiritual journey in 2015 at the inception of Blued Trees, out of a sense of personal despair over whether protection was possible and in search of wisdom. I wanted to effect Earth justice, a concept that has spawned a number of legal initiatives and an organization dedicated to the process of lawmaking to protect the environment. Earth justice is one of several groups pressing for significant policy change, albeit with little success yet. My intention was to take issues like ecocide, into a courtroom to adjudicate what value we put on preserving the ecosystems that we depend upon: judicial system as public art site.
I conceived of the courtroom as a site to effect trigger point theory, to leverage a cultural location for change. That was a conceptual quest that demanded a measure of faith in a legal system of justice and systematic research. That faith is animating many other groups, especially young people to go to trial. Witnessing, as Goya documented in the Disasters of War, or Kathe Kollwitz represented suffering has long been a function of Western art. My task has been to show up as an artist, doing the best work I can, joining others in bearing witness and representing what I observe to others. That is why the Hague is so consequential for me. That task is an effort I believe Lucy Lippard spoke to in a recent interview with Ben Davis about art with roots in the protests of the sixties, "...we had to figure out a way of deciding what we were doing and how what we were doing was worth something, politically. But ... the first step, (was) to use the best work that you had to back up a political cause.”
It happens that Hannukah and Christmas, with their rituals to inspire hope and community, coincide this year. The former is about faith that surmounts reality. The latter is about the promise of a new reality to bring more love into the world. They fall together at a time when many of us feel apprehensive about the future of the world and need hope to surmount reality. Many have expressed hopelessness about the environmental future of our world, democracy and our political sanity. That dystopia is attached most forcefully to climate change and the breakdown of negotiative communications to find solutions in conventional institution. There is ample evidence that these dysfunctional circumstances are the consequences of a deliberate political strategy. The documentation of divisiveness as advanced by Newt Gingrich to enhance the power of the Republican party is the opposite of creating community. Conversation as aesthetic form has long been an art mode and essential to the evolution of social practice art.
The apprehensions of much of the world makes these holidays before the New Year a good time to consider the nature of hope in dialogic terms, the essence of any democratic process, the viability of any community. and key to evaluating the success of most contemporary art, whether or not it is identified as social practice.
The Hague's power may be reduced but it remains an authoritative location where justice can be witnessed and trigger serious discourse. Appearance at the seat of the International Criminal Court a voice for ethical humanity striving towards peace as an international conversation. Bringing the Blued Trees to the Hague will be an opportunity to contribute art's voice to the causes and consequences of climate change for an international conversation about ecocide.
It happens that I will be leading a Reading Group on CliFi by ecoartspace that will begin January 8. We will discuss three books: The Parable of the Sower, Tentacle and The Water Knife. There are several themes to discuss in these three choices, all of which revolve around future social dissolution. Two feature clean freshwater scarcity as one cause for that dissolution. All three project a bleak ecosystem for non-human life after species loss. All three project seminal roles for a young woman. All question the fragile ethical bonds that cement human behavior and permit reasonable discourse. under extreme stress. One considers the fungible role and experience of the artist as witness and documentarian in a dystopic and sexually confusing world., where all reasonable boundaries have dissolved.
The literary device of pathetic fallacy is employed in all three books to anthropomorphize environmental catastrophe and make the narrative that much more dramatic. Reflections on these books as I prepare my thoughts has me contemplating my own recent event at the Anita Rogers Gallery, subtitled, "The Sea Will Have the Last Word." Whether the sea might be sentient is essentially a Gaian concept and perhaps a more hopeful answer, even to the ecocide that has driven me in my decades long pilgrimage. But I beg the question for myself, to what extent did my title project my own anthropomorphism onto a system grounded in physics, utterly alien and indifferent to human experience?
I have been arguing in this series of articles that we inhabit a profoundly narcissistic culture, a culture that crowds out empathy. The three books we will study for the Reading Group all presume a near future for most humans shaped by narcissistic cruelty, defined here as a ruthlessly anthropocentric and short-sighted point of view that privileges a small experience of life for very few people and rejects everything outside the experiences of that group.
Between now and when we open the installations and perform at the Hague, as I question these perceptions, and will be discussing them with colleagues in and out of the Reading Group, I will be reflecting on my mission as an artist or what it means to be an artist at all these days. The Hague represents that part of justice that is measured in accountabil ity for the greatest crimes against humanity. My quest has been internal but along the way I have expressed, recorded and shared my process, is firmly grounded in conceptualism. Conceptualism not only spurred social practice, but spawned several other text based offshoots, including process-based work centered on research practice which has informed many ecoartists, as well as myself. In a research practice, documentation takes on significance as the production of new knowledge, as it would in any other discipline and as with any other academic process, or the judicial system, dependent on critical discourse.
In commercial terms, physical forms have also emerged from Blued Trees as artifacts of my pilgrimage-as-process. Those artifacts have included substantial writing, painted trees, performances, installations and flat works on paper, all to explore how to accomplish climate justice through artmaking.
"... Aviva Rahmani explores the vital role of documentation and dialogue in artistic practice. Through her pioneering work in ecological art and her innovative approaches to environmental restoration, Rahmani offers unique insights into how artists and curators can effectively translate complex environmental issues for diverse audiences." - Svetlana Siqueira Costa
I was honored to have this description of my work. But besides feeling appreciated, she also allowed me to articulate something I have been trying to put in words: the trajectory of intersection between types of observation, whether it's a question of optical perception of the human body or data organization that culminates in insight into human experience. As I said in the same interview, "we're trying to carry this world that we've murdered. It's like we're carrying around the dead body, (in the form of) a dead branch, the dead body of what we've assassinated."
In contemporary art, it is safe to say that the boundaries between forms of perception have softened and blurred. Insight is a time-honored expression of wisdom, in which all art has a place.
As I was musing on these ideas, I bought myself a tiny wooden mannequin, the academic tool used for centuries by artists for representational figurative works , to manipulate as I consider the series of drawings I began last year. "Are We Lost?" There was a time when I intensively studied and eventually taught anatomy for artists and even supported myself with medical illustration. This is not that. But what is continuous is the process of noting how human experience inflects perception for the viewer as much as the observer. Compared to that careful study, I am simply observing a choreographic process now, how moving the torso in relation to the pelvis with change the angle of each shoulder and cast shadows on the thighs. Each adjustment expresses another feeling. As I move the manikin, even as imprecise as it is, I can consider what I will be representing at the Hague. How do we reach out towards each other and the world, past our deepest and most realistic dystopic fears and find a path forward as art shaped by life shaped by art? Perhaps that question is my ultimate pilgrimage and won't end in 2025 at the Hague.