Deeper Dive: How an Environmental Designer Connects with Trees

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Announcer: This is a Getty podcast.

[Rising, meditative music]

Lilit Sadoyan:  Hello, I’m Lilit Sadoyan, the host of OMMM, Our Museum Mindfulness Meditation podcast, Getty’s first video podcast.  Welcome to the Deeper Dive, where we explore the themes of our weekly episodes with experts in everything from paintings conservation to mountain climbing.

Aroussiak Gabrielian: All of these lenses were attempts at getting us to really see not only the intelligence and the agency, but really to see the tree as another living being.

Sadoyan: This week, we did a grounding tree meditation inspired by Théodore Rousseau’s Forest of Fontainebleau, Cluster of Tall Trees Overlooking the Plain of Clair-Bois at the Edge of Bas-Bréau. I spoke with landscape architect and artist, Aroussiak Gabrielian, to understand more about how we as humans can build personal relationships to trees and the landscapes around us. Now, let’s dive in.

[on video call] Aroussiak, thank you so much for joining me today.

Gabrielian: Of course. Thank you for having me.

Sadoyan: So the reason why I thought of you in connection with this episode was because you designed a happening at the Getty Center in connection with Earth Month. So can you start off by telling us more about that work?

Gabrielian: So the piece that I staged at the Getty Garden for Earth Day activation was a meditation, a guided meditation with a tree, of a particular tree, a Peruvian pepper tree that’s in the garden at the Getty, and it was about a 20-minute guided meditation. And one of the things I was responding to is this notion of plant blindness, which is a cognitive bias that we humans have in relation to the biophysical world, and particularly plant matter, where we do not necessarily see the intelligence and the agency of species, um, of particular and specific species.

Everything kind of blends into a background condition for us, a background noise. And as a piece within a larger body of work that stages encounters, very intimate encounters with biophysical matter, the piece for me was about attuning ourselves to the intelligence of this tree. And intelligence here I was looking through multiple lenses. Um, there was a kind of scientific angle that the meditation took us through to really understand the—what we were hearing in terms of the internal sounds of the tree. It was speaking about a kind of spiritual angle by looking at what the tree has meant to the indigenous cultures, where the tree has originated from and how it was used for them. It went through also philosophical questions, and all of these lenses were attempts at getting us to really see not only the intelligence and the agency, but really to see the tree as another living being, and to connect with it on a really bodily, um, bodily level. Bodily level, but also intellectual level. It was trying to fire at all, kind of—trying to do multiple things at once. But the goal was to really attune ourselves to the intelligence and to the agency of this as a living, sensing being.

Sadoyan: That’s incredible, and actually something that really resonated with me about your work is that kinship that we have with trees, that they’re, you know, sensorily alive co-beings and not just objects in a landscape to be perceived, but that, you know, we have this reciprocal embodied relationship with them. Which is also what reminded me of this—the painting for this week’s episode, Théodore Rousseau’s Forest of Fontainebleau, and how he just immersed himself in nature and incessantly sketched from the landscape in which he found himself.

Um, so I’m wondering then how it is that you came to do this work and what informs your—both your academic work and your artistic practice?

Gabrielian: Great question. I think…in retrospect, reflecting back on the influences that brought me to, um, having an interest in the biophysical world and landscape in particular, I think there’s been multiple places and sources of inspiration on an intellectual level.

But on a personal level, I, you know, I was born in Armenia, in the capital, in Yerevan, and, uh, I grew up with my grandparents and my grandfather in particular, who spent most of his youth in the southernmost town of Armenia bordering Iran, actually. It’s the last town before the Araks River, across which is Iran. It’s a completely different ecological and climactic context there. But the people there are very land-oriented. Um, there’s a lot of land-based practices that he grew up with. And wanting us to experience both ways of life, we—you know, we spent half the year living in the city of Yerevan where we went to school, where they worked, and then half the year in the mountains and forests of Dilijan, where we grew everything we ate.

And it was really remarkable on two levels. One was observing the elders in my household tending to the land, which was very ritualistic, very embodied, and it was, you know, also very precise in terms of the science required for particular species to grow and to sustain us. And on the other hand, being able to, and allowed to, wander in nature, in the forest, in the density of the thicket of the forests in Dilijan, which if you know the geography, it’s a kind of a really mystical part of the country, usually covered in fog. There’s a lot of swamps, a lot of wild mushrooms. There’s a lot of mushroom foraging. And, you know, I just spent hours kind of in my own world, immersed in the forest, and I think both of those, uh, were very formative experiences in shaping not only my worldview and understanding of me and the world, but also my interest towards nature and natural systems and ecologies. So those would be the original, probably, seeds that brought me to where I am.

Sadoyan: Sounds awe-inspiring and I can imagine how influential that was for you. Um, funnily enough, Rousseau also, before moving permanently and settling permanently in Barvazan, summered near the forest of Fontainebleau and then retreated to the city, to Paris, during the winter. So he, too, was splitting his time.

Gabrielian: Interesting.

Sadoyan: Um, finally, I’m wondering if you could leave us with an exercise, perhaps something you do yourself, as a means to connect with trees or with nature.

Gabrielian: Probably not something specifically tree-oriented, but one of the things I have my students do as they are tasked with representing the dynamism of the natural world, the fact that it’s changeable, the fact that, that there’s seasonalities, um, is to really—and they have to, you know, document and represent that in multiple ways. But one of the things I ask them to do is really to slow down and change the temporality that we’re used to functioning and moving through the world with. And I don’t know if you remember this, but during the COVID lockdown where life slowed down, because we were forced to, there were so many people who were finally noticing things that were always in their surroundings but that they had never slowed down to actually notice. And there’s, I think, a real power to shifting the lens through which we look at the world and operate in the world. So changing the temporality that we typically move through the world with, slowing down, and really observing and witnessing that which is in front of us, does so much in terms of perceptual, kind of, sharpening and attunement, to really notice how light is hitting a particular leaf, the angle of a particular branch, the insect that might land there for a split second and then fly off. These things are, I think, so valuable in understanding not only, uh, the kind of ecosystems that surround us, but how everything is interconnected and how everything kind of works together and in support of each other in the biophysical world.

Sadoyan: Yeah, and really allowing ourselves to be moved by it, right?

Gabrielian: Yes, exactly.

Sadoyan: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing your insights. I hope that our visitors will come and slow down with Rousseau’s painting. But thank you so much again, Aroussiak, for joining us for this episode.

Gabrielian: Of course. Thank you so much for having me.

[Theme music plays]

Sadoyan: To find the related meditation and see images, transcripts, and additional resources, visit our website at Getty dot edu slash OMMM. That’s O-M-M-M.