The First Tree / El primer árbol
The First Tree is a video installation that transforms the fall of a tree into a critical meditation on the relationship between humans and other forms of life. The work — composed of 110 hand-drawn frames in ink and gold leaf on kraft paper — together with the resulting animation, reflects on our perception of value, loss, and ecological memory.
The animation presents the collapse of a tree, revealing in its place a golden “spirit-tree”: a sanctified silhouette that persists as a testimony of what is no longer present. This auratic ghost is not merely a spiritual metaphor, but a symbolic act of resistance. The gold does not beautify; it elevates absence into a monument to the sacrificed living being, confronting our complicity in the erosion of ecosystems.
The piece deepens an ecological poetics that the artist began exploring in earlier projects such as Preludio (ONA Galería, 2024) and Toda sombra que me puedas dar (Havana Biennial, Centro Wifredo Lam, 2024, in collaboration with Ira Kononenko), reminding us of our essential dependence—material and symbolic—on the vegetal and animal worlds.
