Eternal Forest Sanctuary

An Eternal Forest Sanctuary is a space for art, humans and biodiversity. A space designed in deep time, restoring our psyche, healing our sacred bond with nature, through storytelling and long-term care for a forest by its local community.
 
Eternal Forest Sanctuaries are created through art and poetry experiences, landscape design, and collaborative forest-ecology-art interventions.

This work is placed within a wider context of artistic practice, which explores the human relationship with nature, through the prism of time and our perception of it.

Through works of visual poetry, artist’s books, calligraphy, performance, film, and large-scale ecological art, Eternal Forest invites us to experience sacred depth of nature and think about deep-time.

Eternal Forest Experience - has been launched at the Bienal de Coruche and is in the process of becoming a permanent art and poetry walk with preservation of local biodiversity and protection of forest, under custodianship of Municipality of Coruche, in Portugal (pictured in the photos) and engagement of local community.

The experience is based around Eternal Forest poetry Manifesto, which is at the center of Eternal Forest Sanctuary project. It is written in poetry form in English and Portuguese, it flows as an incantation,  with repetition and circular forms.

Eternal Forest poetry manifesto accompanies every experience and every initiation of every Eternal Forest Sanctuary, following the tradition of oral transmission. It is originally being read by the artist time and time again during Eternal Forest experiences, but also recited collectively as a community performance by people who are present at the initiation of the Sanctuaries.

The project includes a dedicated space in the forest, a series of visual artworks, Eternal Forest Manifesto poetry piece and film, an artist book, which invites the local community to create an Eternal Forest Sanctuary together, and Eternal Forest Experience in the actual forest - along with poetry walk and an Eternal Forest Sanctuary map.

Eternal Forest explores the human relationship with forests, biodiversity and the sacred. Looking at a timeline beyond human life - a hundred, a thousand, 10,000 years, how can art be created at this timescale?

An ongoing art project Eternal Forest Sanctuaries is the vision to create 1000 Eternal Forest Sanctuaries across the World, protected for 1000 years. Each sanctuary a gift of ancient trees and biodiversity to future generations. An expression of hope, love and care for those who will come after us. Let us be remembered as the generations which created 1000 sanctuaries, changing humanity's relationship to nature forever.

Eternal Forest project was born in Portugal, as my response to globally pervasive deforestation, loss of biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, with intention to contribute to rewilding our psyche and our planet. Inviting deep-time thinking, Eternal Forest asks the question: ‘how can we create spaces for deep connection with nature through art and ecology?’