To Recalibrate With Tree Divination, 2022

Terra [Alterities] at Biosphere 2

with artists K-Allado-McDowell , Benjamin Bratton, Alice Bucknell ,Paige Emery, Xin Liu, Laure Michelon, Sahej Rahal, and Yasaman Sheri

To Recalibrate With Tree Divination

Prophetic culture “equips a subject sinking chaos with the ability to imagine a place from which to restart their activity of worlding - even if this ability might coincide, as for those living at the end of a civilization, with the task of creating fertile ruins over which new worlds can emerge”- Federico Campagna

The way we relate to time coincides with the way we commune with land, such as in practices of dendrochronology, or the science of dating with tree rings, and tree divination, or reading trees as a divinatory practice. Correlations between the two lie not only in the telling time with trees but through the perspective of more-than-human participation with time and place that can inspire how we respond to our local landscape. 

Dendrochronology originated from an astronomer’s attempt at observing solar patterns. In a pursued theory of sunspots, he realized the wealth of information about the local climates of Earth that could be revealed. This was not the first case of observing tree rings, but the start of it as a discipline of scientific research, establishing the first home to dendrochronology with the Laboratory of Tree Research at the University of Arizona. Dendrochronology is not just dating by tree rings, but the opening of age-old libraries of timestamps that have recalibrated what we know about environmental changes throughout history. Stories hidden within the lines of trees have become a part of a rewriting of history in a chronological dance that is informing future forecasting within climate science. This type of relationship with the memory keeping of trees unlocks an understanding of what conditions make certain futures possible, and in turn how certain ecological futures might be brought into the present.

Another method of reading trees, tree divination, has taken many forms across cultures throughout history. One example is found through Ogham, the Celtic language of trees, and the first known attempt at a written communication native to the British Isles. Ogham uses words of trees for communication and through its semiotic connection with sacred trees of the landscape, it has been used in divinatory practice in Druid tradition. Through participatory attentiveness with trees, symbolic meanings have been intuited and interpreted for guidance. Divination can perhaps be thought of as a practice of being so attentive and resonant to a more-than-human environment, as seeing the present so clearly that it opens a more graspable understanding of how a future comes into being. 

Although dendrochronology is `a scientific discipline and dendromancy is associated with the realm of mysticism, the two can intertwine in their cosmological inspiration through what philosopher Federico Campagna calls “prophetic culture”, a bridge towards a way of nonlinear worlding that lays fertile grounds for a future for next generations to come. Predictive technologies can learn from ancestral forms of communing with land. In a moment where the climate crisis is unfolding rapidly amongst a dominating linear-progressive timescape, a more-than-human, nonlinear relationship with time and place can offer hope in how we can respond in a localized present for an embodied futurity brought into being.