Clarice Lima introduces WOODS

Bosque/ Woods is the third part of the Plantação/ Plantation trilogy, born from a desire to create roots in the cities we live in. 

Clarice Lima and a collective of international artists have been exploring the idea of the impermanence and instability of the body, nature and climate since 2009. Asking; while upside down, does the body invert space and question time? For how long will the body stand? For how long will the forest stand?

The Plantação/ Plantation series creates different scales of temporary landscapes, of metaphorical trees in the city. It inquires about other possible ways for a body to resist, to persist, to carry through potentialities against the city concrete, the lack of nature, the climate changes, the missing trees and the forgotten woods.

Saia/ Skirt (2009) was the first part of the Plantação/ Plantation trilogy. It was a performance where a woman goes to different places in a city planting a single tree upside down. The image of the single body in a headstand, covered with a skirt and showing only the legs last the time of a picture. The pictures were the result of the work and were shown in individual and collective art exhibitions at museums and galleries.

Árvores/ Trees (2010) was a live performance starting from the same body upside down covered with a skirt. The performance was presented with 10 Tree-Performers and it lasted as long as the body could resist. Ten years later we still tour with this performance and we have done more than a hundred shows but somehow it seems that we need more. We need more than to plant some random trees in the corner of the cities, in the side ways of the cars or where it’s convenient for human beings. 

Bosque/ Woods (2021) goes further in the idea of creating a landscape in the city, looking into how collective practices can deepen this work. Nature is wild and it must take over the city. In this new creation we want to go deeper into the idea of creating a biome with the reference of the works Pastizale and Sur L’Herbe from Alexandra Kehayoglou AR, Divisor of Lygia Pape BR and the Burle Marx BR landscapes.

To create Woods we need a bigger group of people to take part in the performance, inviting more local people to join us in the plantation of a forest. In this new creation, we work with the idea of forest focusing on participant’s resistance but also in the new idealization of costumes. The costumes are created from recycled materials and create an organic, strong and visual biodiverse landscape composed by all Tree Performers. Bosque/ Woods closes this trilogy on body, nature and climate with more precision and awareness of the importance of collective artistic practices.

Woods arrives in Bristol on 17 and 18 June 2022 for four performances in city centre Broadmead as part of IBT WILDNESS. This is a free, public performance. 

Explore the IBT Wildness programme.