A 33-metre spruce is the main subject of Eija-Liisa Athila’s film Horizontal. Lasting 6 minutes, the film shows the tree lying down in a smaller-than-life size. For the World Living Soils Forum, Horizontal is shown on a wall of LED panels almost 11 metres long.

Eija-Liisa Ahtila is an internationally renowned Finnish artist. Since the early 90s, she has been known for her video installations that probe the human psyche. In 2011, she decided to turn her attention to living things, and more specifically to this spruce tree in Finland. The spruce is at the heart of the cinematographic and artistic device, and becomes the medium through which the genre of the plant portrait is established. In short, the work is like a portrait of a tree unified on a single plane. The tree was actually filmed using several cameras.

Presented as part of the World Living Soil Forum, Horizontal takes on new connotations. Beyond the humility it invites us to assume, the work evokes the importance of agroforestry within viticulture (vitiforestry being at the service of living soils). It also leads us to rethink the importance of images in reshaping our relationship with the living world. The tree breathes with its grandeur and tranquillity as a guardian of the soil, with a human being at its feet, presented here as an indication of a new relationship with the world around us.

This work was presented in Luma Arles alongside a public program with Emanuele Coccia, Daniel Lie and Natsuko Uchino (curated by Julia Marchand)