Olga Papadopoulou

“(I am) the tree and (I am) the forest”

experience room II / installation // 2020-2022

mixed media, dimensions (approx.): 5*6*2m

“Once upon a time I was standing on the ground, I was tall and strong and vivid.

Time passes, seasons change.

Once upon a time I was standing on my own alone, broken and thirsty and maybe dead.

Then I looked around, then I looked inside. 

Once upon a time I found myself within a forest. 

Or maybe even, I found a forest within myself.”

Drawings of dry branches compose an experiential forest landscape in a form of an idiosyncratic 3D puzzle: pieces of trunks deconstruct and reconstruct tree forms, depending on the viewer’s perspective as one walks through the installation, while the whole forest is visually recreated  from a single point of view.

With direct reference to the well-known expression "miss the forest  for the tree" (and also the exact opposite), the work negotiates the concept of identity splitting, but also dependency relations between the "parts" and the "whole". At the same time, it becomes an allegory on the fragility of our own personal and social existence, within the constant mutating, increasingly aggressive, subversive and entropic conditions, which overall characterize our social, economic, political and physical environment.

Viewers are invited to participate in a visual and emotional experience, to wander in this virtual forest, to reflect, to build and reconstruct their relationship with nature and, maybe even, with their own self.