Not with spectacular flames and smoke, but slowly. We fade, we rot. We smolder.

We long for distant times or places, and even though everything is present, we still do not feel that what we have is complete. Something is sorely missing. Something we have forgotten, though it may never have been real. With imagined landscapes and this “something else,” we try to make up for and conceal the gaps in our incomplete reality, yet we still cannot grasp the image, the moment, the feeling; whatever we achieve immediately becomes part of the past.

Because our memory hardens with us, and whatever is embedded is immediately sealed off. We don’t just replace the real thing; we immediately take its place, because the deeper it goes, the slower it will catch fire.

(Steps back, human again) Just like the trees, as I look at them in the space. One is merely a distant image of its original presence, simultaneously more and less than that. It is the ephemeral manifestation of an eternal yearning, documenting its own decay. The other tree is more of a structural model — a family tree or a branch diagram — that describes a hierarchical system. They are in the process of transformation. Sometimes, as an eroding memory, which is an unstable form, no matter how I try to frame it. At other times, it is an abstract infrastructure that turns from a living being into matter, which could easily be either a channel or a medium. The one thing our trees have in common is not their form, but the fact that they break away from direct experience and make absence visible.