Saturday, September 6th at 1 PM
a haunted botany: a performance for a forgotten forest
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, artists Gwyneth Shanks and AB Brown invite you to immerse yourself in histories you’ve been taught to forget. Through embodied ritual, their performance, a haunted botany, calls forth Eastern White Pine’s pasts, which continue to shape American identity and its undoing. Performed in The Arnold Arboretum’s Eastern White Pine grove, a haunted botany brings the archive to life, revealing how imperial ambition and resistance took root not just in founding documents, but also in soil, timber, and breath. a haunted botany urges audiences to reckon with the memories and histories of the US. What can a tree remember? In the shadow of old rebellions, as our climate shifts and the past fractures our present, how do we summon new futures?
Related Event at Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University
Tree Mob: The Trees that Shaped the Seas
On Friday, September 5th, join Materials Science Professor Lorna Gibson for a Tree Mob on tree species that were used to build colonial ships. From dense oak hulls designed to withstand cannonballs, to tall, straight masts made out of towering pine trees, each tree species was selected for its own unique strengths– both in the forest and at sea.
