INS 006         Forest of Lines         Pierre Huyghe         2008

Header image: Sydney Opera House, 16. Biennale of Sydney 
© Daniel Boud
Text I: Publicdelivery, Text II: Esther Schipper

A forest suddenly materializes in the Sydney Opera House. The exhibition runs for the duration of one Earth rotation. People enter wearing headlamps and get lost in this forest composed of a thousand trees and mist. It takes over the whole space, the seating, the aisles, the stage, and balconies. It is a place of diversion, a point of departure. Following the structure of the Aboriginal songlines, where songs provide a mythical and geographical description of a path, enabling orientation in the desert, the words of a song provides an oral map to shift from the place of representation toward the source of the image.

The space blurs boundaries, eliminating the separation between the audience and the art where they can become the performance as they explore the constructed forest in the theatre made of a thousand real trees, inside the concert hall at the Sydney Opera House. (…) This is a space of representation, in which an environment has been transplanted, and becomes a liminal place that is somewhere between nature and urban, a place that lays somewhere in between fiction and fact.

© Pierry Huyghe

© Paul Green

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