IN-TREE-NET

 

In-Tree-Net, site-specific installation at MoCA Westport, 2021, trees, plumbing hardware

 

In-Tree-Net is part of a series of installations we create specifically out of trees and branches mounted on walls and ceilings. The concept of the project responds to the current environmental issues and examines the links and connections between energy resources and nature. Assembled together with plumbing components these structures closely resemble conventional engineering systems that bring energy like water, gas, or electricity that bring energy into the buildings. Playing with the likeness and confronting the industrial visual language with the natural and organic forms the project explores the dilemma between natural and artificial systems. Trees and their complex interconnection present in the ecosystem of the woods are here reduced to a rigid model representing the mechanistic and utilitarian approach towards Nature. In-Tree-Net highlights the natural elements in the architecture to recall the fact that the indoor lifestyle depends on vital natural resources that architecture tends to cover and hide. It represents the hidden connection between the indoor and outdoor reality pointing to the environmental dependency of the seemingly independent interior environment.

In-Tree-Net investigates the influence of architecture and the isolating effects of buildings on the way we relate to the environment and nature. It follows the phenomena of a new type of species: Homo Interius contemporary human, who spends most of their life indoors in the comfort of a white cube separated from the influence of the surrounding environment. Despite the unlimited access to a flood of information, his relationship to his immediate surroundings and the environmental context is blurred and disconnected. In-Tree-Net confronts the alienation of the interior-based culture and the loss of context of the built space implying a reconnection of a fragmented environment to a whole.

In-Tree-Net critically approaches a mechanical understanding of nature that produces the perspective that nature as such has borders, beginning, and end, similar to a machine. On the contrary, In-Tree-Net presents Nature as an organic element of connections that penetrates not only the walls but crosses artificial borders that divide landscape without a context, cutting through the mountains and rivers.