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In the silence preceding every word, nature guards a language that humankind has forgotten. With Vanishing Trees, Debora Hirsch restores voice to three endangered species in the wild: Ginkgo biloba, Pterocarya fraxinifolia and Torreya taxifolia, transforming them into living presences, witnesses of a world that endures time and oblivion.

The work was born as a digital installation, but its true driving force is the memory that animates it and transforms it into experience. The images take shape and dissolve like natural cycles, evoking the continuity between growth and disappearance. The digital lens amplifies memory, translating the biological and symbolic legacy of the past into a contemporary language.

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In the artist’s work, vegetal forms become presences suspended between vital time and historical time, evoking an almost archetypal dimension, where the tree is elevated to a silent icon of resistance. In the video the trees express themselves in the first person. They “speak” through the texts of Lucas Mertehikian, a scholar with whom Hirsch has developed her research in the field of Plant Humanities. In this way the artist replaces the human point of view with that of nature; it is a radical and at the same time compassionate gesture. In this monologue, technology becomes a language of resonance and a means through which the vegetal matter regains consciousness and voice. The generated images thus take shape as a site of mediation between scientific memory, imagination, and cultural tradition, where contemporary technologies operate as instruments of continuity, reactivating the past within the present.

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Ginkgo biloba is the sole survivor of a plant order dating back more than two hundred million years. Having withstood geological catastrophes, glaciations, and even the atomic explosion in Hiroshima, it embodies the principle of immortality. In its bilobed leaves, a symbol of unity within duality, Hirsch recognizes a form of life that endures without ever extinguishing itself, and a memory that traverses epochs as a continuous line between destruction and rebirth.

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Pterocarya fraxinifolia, or Caucasian wingnut, sinks its roots along rivers, inhabiting the shifting boundary between water and land. With its hanging inflorescences and winged fruits travelling on the wind, it becomes for the artist a symbol of voyage and transmission. It is the image of an unending energy that migrates, adapts, and survives mutation like a thought in motion. Its vegetal wings form both a vital principle and a biological structure, carrying the hope of life itself.

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Torreya taxifolia, known as Florida nutmeg, lives on the edge of disappearance. The rarest of North American conifers, it survives almost solely through clonal sprouts that regenerate from its own stumps: a body that is reborn but does not grow, a life suspended between being and vanishing. Hirsch transforms it into a poetic figure of extinction, a symbol of the turning point between rebirth and surrender. It is a form of life that resists but does not evolve.

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At the base of the project there is archival research of iconographic, literary and scientific origin, carried out in collaboration with two institutions of excellence: the Orto Botanico di Brera, part of the University of Milan, and the New York Botanical Garden. Video footage produced at the Orto Botanico di Brera, photographic material, images arriving from herbaria, and others arriving from extensive historical research of engravings, lithographs, botanical drawings and rare materials, are selected and reworked by the artist in a process that merges scientific memory and aesthetic sensitivity, translating the legacy of the past into a contemporary language.

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The Orto Botanico di Brera marks the origin of the project: the place where the artist worked and the site that houses the three trees at its center. Among them, the Caucasian wingnut (Pterocarya fraxinifolia) and the two Ginkgo biloba trees (male and female) have recently been designated as ‘Monumental Trees’ by the Italian state for their age, size, and historical significance. The direct observation of these specimens, in their slow transformations, in their scars, in their variations of colour, allowed Hirsch to grasp aspects that no archive can restore. Brera thus becomes the context that imprints its rhythm and its presence on the work. The images of the video preserve this direct experience, bringing into the digital dimension the matter, the light and the traces of the real trees.

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Debora Hirsch’s research has developed over the years through the investigation of the cultural genealogies of nature, combining botanical, historical and technological studies and working on archives, datasets and algorithmic processes. In this continuity, her practice finds today a territory in which the painterly gesture and algorithmic experimentation influence each other. The project Vanishing Trees therefore inaugurates a new aesthetic: painting becomes the starting point that directs the forms generated by the digital. At the same time, the vision produced by AI, with its capacity to relaunch unexpected forms and to amplify invisible details, returns to the physical plane, influencing the composition and rhythm of the material works that the artist develops alongside the video. In this reciprocal exchange, AI introduces a quality of unpredictability, intensifying the work of the artist who, through the choice of datasets and editing, directs the algorithmic generation. Painting and AI thus become two creative processes that feed each other: the digital opens areas that the artist’s hand can make her own, the painting returns to the digital a latent physicality. This reciprocity generates a new visual language, attested by the presence in the exhibition of a physical work, Fragmenta, also created specifically for Palazzo Citterio.

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The video unfolds like a visual poem, and the phrases that move across the images, spoken by the trees themselves, constitute an essential account of the life and time of the three trees. Hirsch conveys to them a conscious and lucid voice. It is an act of empathy in which the artist places herself in a position of listening, allowing nature to tell its story through artificial language. The work begins with an essential question: what does it mean today to recognize and preserve what is at risk of disappearing? As Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “everything that lives is a riddle that asks to be seen.” It is not only a question of protection, but of gaze. It means questioning how much we are still able to truly see, to feel the continuity between us and what lives outside our perimeter.

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To recognize becomes an act of responsibility, and to preserve a gesture of listening towards what, though not speaking our language, concerns us intimately. Alongside this, another element emerges from the work: imagining a tomorrow for life forms that risk extinction. Artificial intelligence generates continuity for the image, a way to prolong the presence of the trees beyond their biological fragility. The video seeks to extend the existence of the three trees by evoking memory, providing them with additional time and a renewed space to inhabit, if only within the confines of the image.

 

In the dialogue between art, science and humanistic thought, Vanishing Trees reactivates a memory that belongs to Western culture, the one that has always recognized in trees the visible form of thought. From the tree of knowledge in Genesis to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s tree of life, up to Charles Baudelaire’s forest of symbols, arboreal nature has been for centuries the language through which humankind has expressed the complexity of the world. Hirsch gathers this legacy and translates it into a digital grammar, where every image is at once scientific data and metaphor. Her reflection is situated in the territory of contemporary Plant Humanities, which investigates plants as subjects of knowledge, capable of shaping thoughts, worldviews and forms of relation, and through which humanity has developed categories such as origin, transformation, cyclicality and care. In this framework, Hirsch’s work introduces a further dimension, showing how new technologies can become tools to rethink our cultural genealogy, reactivating in vegetal images their ability to produce knowledge.

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Finally, the work finds its deepest core through the awareness that every form of knowledge, ancient or contemporary, is born from an act of listening towards life. Every image in the video is thus the result of a double genealogy, natural and cultural. Science provides the structure, history and philosophy offer the meaning, and digital art unites them in a language that brings knowledge back to its original value, that of an experience shared between humankind and the life that surrounds it.

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Clelia Patella