Curatorial Notes

"Do a little dance and become a tree." Eugenio Ampudia’s instruction to the Art Fair goers seems quirkily amusing. However, the emergency that he is addressing could not be more urgent and serious.

Be a Tree Now! is a participatory movement that responds to the call for climate justice by using dance to dissolve the divide between humans and nature. The participants are asked to think, represent, and see themselves as a tree by performing simple arm movements in front of a camera. The result is a moving multiple-exposure image resembling a tree's canopy. “Ultimately, I would like to create a forest with all the citizens that will participate in the action in the Philippines, that will demonstrate society's interest in resolving the climate crisis,” Ampudia hopes.

This initiative is motivated by the idea of the Biocene, an antidote to the unmistakable impact of the Anthropocene. The Biocene places at its center the care of life and all the fabric that sustains it and reevaluates the status of humans as equally interdependent beings as trees, as grass, microbes, or other life forms.

In 2020, Ampudia forwarded this idea of equality of the plant world and human beings in his project El Concierto para el Bioceno. He gathered 2,292 plants from the local nurseries, sat them each on every seat in the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, and played for them a live string quartet performance of Puccini’s Crisantemi.

Ampudia is known for transmitting ideas in an intimate and collaborative way: “I believe that artists should be approachable. The artistic practices from the twentieth-century often place artists in a more distant position from the audience. Nowadays, what we do is engage in a dialogue on equal terms with the participants.” His casual attitude towards the climate crisis does not deny the gravity of the situation, instead affords defiance, “Humor is a sign of closeness and empathy, a necessity to lighten the weight of significant issues, making them more relatable. I have the impression that citizens, feeling that closeness, become more involved.”

Eugenio Ampudia is a Spanish artist whose work has been exhibited internationally and is part of important museums and private and institutional collections. Ampudia has received the award for best living Spanish artist at ARCO 2008 and 2018, the year in which he also won the Beep Award for best technological work. In 2008 he was awarded a scholarship from the Delfina Foundation in London.

The project has been produced and supported by Oxfam, Spark, and the European Union and can be accessed through the website beatreenow.org.

Words by Carla Gamalinda

About the Artist

In partnership with the Embassy of Spain in Manila, Art Fair Philippines 2024 will also feature a special exhibition by Spanish artist Eugenio Ampudia entitled Be A Tree Now. Ampudia’s works often re-creates real and imaginary spaces using visual imagery to explore our emotional connections to them.