Presso il Madison Square a New York l'artista Maya Lin installa a dal prossimo 10 Maggio l'opera "The Ghost Forest". Si tratta di un imponente gruppo di cinquanta inquietanti alberi di cedro bianco dell'Atlantico posizionati sulla piazza.
Lin porta la sua visione di artista e la sua posizione di attivista ambientale in questo progetto, un ricordo di germinazione, vegetazione e abbondanza e un simbolo aspro della devastazione del cambiamento climatico. L'altezza di ogni albero, circa quaranta piedi, travolge la scala umana e si pone come metafora dell'impatto fuori misura di un'incombente calamità ambientale.
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Maya Lin’s Ghost Forest, a towering stand of fifty haunting Atlantic white cedar trees, is a newly-commissioned public art work. Lin brings her vision as an artist and her agency as an environmental activist to this project, a memory of germination, vegetation, and abundance and a harsh symbol of the devastation of climate change. The height of each tree, around forty feet, overwhelms human scale and stands as a metaphor of the outsized impact of a looming environmental calamity.
In nature, a ghost forest is the evidence of a dead woodland that was once vibrant. Atlantic white cedar populations on the East Coast are endangered by past forestry practices and threats from climate change, including extreme weather events that yield salt water intrusion, wind events, and fire. The trees in Ghost Forest were all slated to be cleared as part of regeneration efforts in the fragile ecosystem of the Pine Barrens of New Jersey.
The magnitude of planetary vulnerability is a significant subject in Lin’s practice through sculpture, installation, and her web-based resource, What Is Missing?. Now two generations removed from the Earthwork artists of the 1960s and 1970s, Lin is taking on rural and urban outdoor space with a focus on geology and the fragility of the earth’s ecosystem.
