Collectively, all humans experience 8 billion days in 24 hours. That is about 22 million years lived in one day.

Rok Kranjc

When one starts to think about time in that way, it seems inevitable to envision the collective impact of human life on Earth. While the term Anthropocene has been rejected by the International Commission on Stratigraphy as a geological epoch that would mark the conclusion of the Meghalayan Age of the Holocene Epoch, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) agrees that it needs to be formalized. Ideally, the Anthropocene would be defined by a ‘golden spike,’ a standard unit in the Geological Time Scale, with the most significant and globally synchronous marker being the artificial radionuclides spread worldwide by thermonuclear bomb tests from the 1950s. While the value of the term as a geological epoch is still debated, it has proven useful in other discourses.

At the same time, the term Anthropocene has been widely critiqued for being too human-centric or too generalized for entire population to bear the guilt. It has been substituted with alternatives like Capitalocene or Chthulucene. Regardless of what the anthropogenic impact might be called in the future, its full scope has yet to unfold. We collectively spend millions of years day by day, until one day, nothing on the planet remains in its first-hand raw form. All the ‘rock’ is discarded concrete mixed with rubbish, poured back into previously hollowed-out mountains; no water is fresh anymore; no seas exist without a certain percentage of microplastics; and all materials on the market bear a Generation-n mark, a vintage-recycle. AWG will probably vote on anthropocene epoch again in 440 million years. This introduction serves to justify putting Anthropocene in focus—outdated as it may seem—or, to borrow Donna Haraway’s relationship with the term, “what and whom the Anthropocene collects in its refurbished netbag might prove potent for living in the ruins.” 

In this article, we briefly explore intercalations: paginated exhibition, a books-as-exhibitions series co-edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin in conjunction with The Anthropocene Project by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in 2013/2014. The series so far includes six intercalations: paginated exhibition booklets, freely available at K. Verlag, with the latest edition, Decapitated Economies, due in March 2025. This time, we focus on contributions from The Word for World is Still Forest (2017), a publication that may be of particular interest to landscape architects.

Scientists may cringe when artists engage with problems belonging to their field of expertise, yet artists can reach wider audiences and evoke emotional responses by narrating the somewhat obvious in a more compelling way than a graph or data visualization. Katie Holten, for example, created a tree typeface, where lowercase letters depict young trees and uppercase letters depict mature trees—A for apple, B for beech, C for cedar, and so on. The visualization of human-created environmental problems, whether through the sublime or the shocking, can broaden perspectives. Besides, art has increasingly become an open-ended experiment in education, and exhibitions have evolved into pedagogical spaces where visitors are invited to participate in knowledge exchange.

One such example was the Anthropocene program at HKW, active until 2022, which produced an international research platform called Curriculum, followed by Anthropocene Commons. Working extra-academia, these platforms sought to create spaces that were less in favour of, yet still produced by the same institutional structures. The research, cultural, and artistic practices available on these platforms may seem overwhelming and disorienting, yet they offer hidden gems.

Returning to intercalations: intercalation refers to a foreign unit or a particle inserted into a gap in space or time. It represents a break in a continuous, homogeneous structure and interpolates it. The title of the book-as-exhibition series on the Anthropocene suggests a need to intercalate official narratives with “transformative and erratic new layers”. To achieve this, Springer and Turpin, along with co-editors, invite artists, architects, writers, curators, planners, elders, philosophers, and other researchers to insert perspectives into an otherwise homogeneous discourse on a theme. One ChatGPT query consumes ten times more energy than a browser search. In this way, intercalations offer a multiplicity of views and a complex of images of a forest, for example, an interpretation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel, a multifaceted view of a crystal forest, data interpretations on a curated selection of plants residing at the Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, now very well known research by Suzanne Simard on the tree networks and oral traditions of the Indigenous groups.

To point out one, the article by Paulo Tavares, The Political Nature of the Forest: A Botanic Archaeology of Genocide, takes us through the violent erasure of the Amazonian forest and its social structures during the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–85). Contrary to colonial-era narratives depicting the Amazon as terra nullius (and a land to be exploited), Tavares, using botanic archaeology and Forensic Architecture, located the ruins of the dispossessed Waimiri Atroari people. Spectral differences in canopy structures, observed through remote sensing, revealed patterns of formerly inhabited clearings—exposing the “epistemological myopia” of Western culture, depicting the Amazonian forest as primal and its species composition unaffected by people. In estimate, as much as 12% of the Amazon is believed to be an anthropogenic forest—what William Balée calls cultural forests. Tavares proposes interpreting Amazonia through the syntax of urban design and, further, redefining urban space to incorporate the “constructed nature” with a forest in mind that encompasses a multi-species polity.

The book exhibition also presents two cases of urban forests in Berlin: one in Tiergarten, almost entirely depleted for firewood during World War II (when only 700 of the original 200,000 trees remained, and identified by Sandra Bartoli), and another concerning a clearing by the city’s Parks Department that was carried out without public consultation or adherence to existing regulations.

These snippets bring attention to the line of research in Anthropocene discourse focusing on ‘forest typology’—a topic we will explore further in the coming months. Numerous recent publications on Forests show that we are learning to see this ‘typology’ anew. Seeing the forest as a part of an anthropogenic landscape, or humans as forest dwellers, poses yet another claim against the division of ‘natural’ and ‘man-made’ by enclosure, or seeing the forest as a thinking entity as Eduardo Kohn suggests. Intercalations 4 offers an introduction to the complex entanglements of forests, urging us to break away from generalized thinking and seeing. As in the wake of the Anthropocene, we’ve started anxiously lamenting the loss, this time not of the savage nature but the loss of intelligence beyond our knowing. The forest perceived as a complex and perfected climax state, exuberant, vibrant and indifferent to humans, seems to pose an ideal place to look for a new morality, posthumanism dispersing the otherness. “Killing off whatever alterity may remain is a Final Solution of sorts” as Kohn puts it.