Leaving the city, going out, breathing relieved. Nature, forest. Disconnect to reconnect. In the essay El retorn al bosc. Pistes per comprendre la societat de la incertesa (Pòrtic), Fèlix Riera (Barcelona, 1964) tries to offer the reader some keys to understand why more than a trend it is a background current that must be taken into account.
Riera remembers an exhibition in Paris, at the Cartier Foundation: "Why are the cherry blossoms in Damien Hirst related to the people who are seeing them?" He was "surprised by the symbiosis between the object, the enormous work of paintings, and that public that almost wanted to inhabit those fantastic spaces that somehow implied a return to the forest, de facto", in a space that "became an act of communion between the visitors and the work”.
The essay covers artists and thinkers through whom he observes reality: “The anticipatory nature of art has always been very interesting to me. At the same time that Proust wrote the first volume of In Search of Lost Time, a man discovered Alzheimer's. They are cultural moments of coincidence, with Proust, Alzheimer, Bergson... they are combined at the same time in a work that, in addition to memory and forgetfulness, speaks of creation and truth, reality and fantasy”.
But it is not just about aesthetics, “there are a number of thinkers who are going in the direction of noticing that there is a change in general sensibility, who talk about what I call the moral right to breathe, about the suffocation of the sphere of capitalism and at the same time the need for clean air, or people talking about what role the Earth has to play in relation to people and what role people have to play too. Not from the point of view exclusively of climate change, but from a relationship of an almost anthropological nature. What do you place in the center, the Earth or the human being?
For Riera –director of the Fundació Romea and co-director of the cultural publication Hänsel i Gretel–, “there is a different psychological order that is affecting many people who are looking for how to relate to the future and begin to understand the past from a different perspective, and from Hence, building a new vision of the cosmos of the person and also of the relations of the State with these people”. Thus, for example, "many of the people who have decided not to cast their vote do not do so because they have lost interest in politics, but on the contrary: they are so highly politicized that they consider that today politics is no longer done at the polls but outside." ”.
It is an essay that constantly oscillates between literalness and metaphor, which speaks of returning to the forest as a natural environment, but also as a distance from the system, in "a crisis of identification with the role of the State": "There has been a subtle displacement since the financial crisis of 2008, in which the State's relationship with us was based on the citizen's currency, a relationship that has shifted to people, and that implies a great burden of subjectivity on reality”.
Thus, he speaks of a series of “moral rights”, not only to breathe –either demanding clean air as tranquility– or the moral right of the Earth, but also the demand of many young people to disassociate themselves from adults: “They think that they have to be in control of their lives because adults are not capable of carrying out their life project. The management of climate change is parallel: young people see that adults are not even capable of agreeing on how to lead this fight, because much has been said but nothing has been done”.
And it is that the forest, which had represented danger, is now a protective refuge, and even makes a parallel with The Lord of the Rings or the universe of Star Wars: it is among the splendid nature where the good guys are. A touch of attention.
Catalan version, here
