La Primavera Forest is a highly important natural reserve in the city of Guadalajara, México that is at risk due to deforestation. One of the main causes, are provoqued fires that give way to land-use change for agricultural or construction purposes.

Cenizas is an audiovisual experience that culminates in a collective ceremony to remember our origins and to digest and cleanse our anthropocentric arrogance. After tasting ashes from collected after a fire in the Primavera Forest, I invited the audience to join the communion.

“The story of the forest is written on the skin of trees,” writes Verónica Gerber Bicecci in Mudanzas.

“Trees have memories and feel pain,” says Peter Wohlleben in his book The Hidden Life of Trees.

The Yanomami tribe consumes the ashes of their dead to return that vital energy to the family.

Ingesting forest ashes is a way of returning to the spirit of the forest, to the origin of all experience. It is a reminder that each breath is an intimate communion between our bodies and the plants that make our existence possible. Tasting the forest awakens ancient memories that reactivate relationships of care and responsibility between humans and the vegetal world.

Cenizas was presented at Oficio y Experimentación in Guadalajara, 2022. Video still of single channel video.

Photography by Ana Quiñones

Cenizas, single channel video.