Studio Orta

This installation of forty embroideries unfold, verse by verse, a conversation between the ancestral Mother Earth, Gaia, and her rational counterpart, Progress. Experienced sequentially — through immersive audio or by reading the poem from left to right — the work echoes the journey Lucy + Jorge Orta undertook during their first expedition to the Amazon in 2009.

“It all happens here – between cloud and air,
between water and vapour,
between a plant and its root,
between sunbeam and green.
Here – between my forest and the steam it makes of rain –
the world is that web strung between.” — Gaia

Travelling to 4,800 metres above sea level in the Andes, to the glacial sources of the Amazon, the artists documented plant species migrating upslope from the elfin forest below. Descending through cloud forest along the Trocha Unión — an ancient Inca footpath increasingly destabilised by landslides — they reached a tributary of the Amazon and navigated the Madre de Dios, whose waters are contaminated by illegal mining. The wall poem invites reflection on the accelerating tension between technological expansion and ecological systems. As Progress states:

“Globally, something like a dozen hectares of forest are lost every minute — over six million annually. Twice the size of Belgium. Each year, between 18 and 50 thousand species may sink into history. Each hour, approximately four extinctions — between 100 and 1000 times the natural rate. The fate of as many as a million species may hinge on habitat loss and climate change.”

Throughout the poem, Gaia cautions: “Tug at any one thing. The rest will move.”

The text was written by eco-poet Mario Petrucci in collaboration with the artists.