“Silent and dignified, extraordinarily ancient yet full of the future, beautiful and useful, autonomous and non-violent, are trees not the model we need?”

Francis Hallé (1938-2026), biologist, botanist, writer, and professor emeritus at the University of Montpellier.

My love for plants was born early in my life. We used to build cables and little houses between the fingers of tree roots in the mountains, disturbing ants and moving fir needles and autumn leaves; we would find small insect furrows or some beetle on its back. Dead. My sisters and I imagined living there. That is how we spent our breaks away from our parents. It was the most beautiful time I remember during Sundays of tedious family walks.

It was June 2008. An article written by Carole Kaesuk Yoon was published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica. It was titled “Plants are social beings. Now there is proof.” My imagination began to soar. So, do they greet each other, do they organize themselves? What would it be like to learn from them? How can organisms so different from humans be social? A few years later, in 2015, I read about a collective of artists who were recording the sounds of a group of trees and had thus begun to investigate their communication. All of this, together with my lifelong search for life within the tension of nature rather than that of cities (even if they are ecosystems as well), led me to work on the ResidenzaLAB project.

We are living in a fascinating period, yet one so strange and treacherous that I cannot decide whether to be afraid of war or not, or whether to decide if we must all rearm and learn to shoot, or if it is better to produce more culture with this money that, for the purchase of arsenals, seems to be available. A miracle. I do not lament the farewell of values overtaken by a wiser evolution, but if decrees, prohibitions, enemies, evictions, and deportations are strictly announced in a heated moment, I want constitutions to mean something; I want them to be true commitments, the contents of which have been studied by those who must—to be elected and because they are responsible individuals—respect them.

What I know is that the opposite of War is Dialogue. And if plants know something more about it, I am ready to learn from them, to translate and perhaps find a new wisdom that helps us, that helps me. I am convinced that we need broad perspectives and other examples to look at the things of life and to build networks of people who want to be part of projects of conviviality and dialogue between different realities. Without weapons and hatred, but with open senses and a large heart.

Sibylle Gabathuler Ciarloni, curator of the ResidenzaLAB project