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Rural communities in Europe that defend land-based practices and livelihoods face pressures to modernize in ways that reproduce a nature‒culture dualism. Design methods informed by Latin American ontologies seek to help communities identify and resist capitalist enclosure, make visible and legitimize local ways of knowing and traditions, and foster learning processes toward autonomy. Here, we report on our experiences in land-oriented, community-led participatory design, making material, communal artifacts in Italy and Spain. The artifacts range from animal stables to bee apiaries. We examine the artifacts and their makings through a lens of territorio (territory) to demonstrate a different land-based reality that resists colonial oppression. In these realities, communities are not mere observers of the changes around them, but they make their own present through the making of artifacts. These relational design methods supporting planetary co-habitability require care-full community-led engagement with the land.

Las comunidades rurales de Europa que defienden prácticas y medios de vida basados en la tierra enfrentan presiones para modernizarse de maneras que no hacen más que reproducir el dualismo naturaleza‒cultura. Los métodos de diseño informados por ontologías latinoamericanas buscan ayudar a las comunidades a identificar y resistir el cercamiento capitalista, visibilizar y legitimar los saberes y las tradiciones locales, y fomentar procesos de aprendizaje orientados a la autonomía. Aquí damos cuenta de nuestras experiencias de diseño participativo orientado a la tierra y liderado por la comunidad, mediante la elaboración de artefactos materiales comunitarios en Italia y España. Los artefactos abarcan desde establos para animales hasta colmenas. Examinamos estos artefactos y su proceso de elaboración a través de la categoría de territorio para mostrar una realidad distinta, basada en la tierra, que resiste la opresión colonial. En estas realidades, las comunidades no son meras observadoras de los cambios que las rodean, sino que construyen su propio presente a través de la elaboración de artefactos. Estos métodos de diseño relacional que apoyan la cohabitabilidad planetaria requieren una vinculación cuidadosa con la tierra, liderada por la comunidad.

This lecture performance is about the form of reforestation as a transhemispheric, spiritually grounded practice – less a technical solution and more a ritual of relations. Luis draws from work in Puerto Rico, Denmark, and Sweden, where tree nurseries are potent places for broad forms of Land-based learning and action. In these sites, communities tend damaged environments while reopening questions about nature’s personhood and how landscapes embody colonial trauma. Clay and ceramics serve as a key mediating materials, shaping mythological and meteorological forms such as the hurricane into social and sculptural forms that guide how we listen with the Land.Through four artworks rooted in the artistic research of treeling propagation – Estratas Viveros Entrañas (2022), Ensayo de cuna a Guatubá (2024), Refuge (since 2023), and Caudex (since 2023) – the lecture reflects on how forest geo-aesthetics and phenomenotechnics influence our sense of reality, of biodiversity, and of colonial trauma. These works trace care and collaboration across hemispheres as infrastructures that can question extractive forestry, market-led geoengineering, and the reproduction of colonial violence. Together, these installations display environmental re-mediation of forests (ie. as healing, as medium, and as revised messaging) as an invitation to another kind of worldmaking.

Luis Berríos Negrón and collaborators presented the installation and performance titled Caudex at Arboretum Norr, located in the neighbourhood of Baggböle in Umeå, on Saturday 6 September, 2025.

Caudex stages rudimentary tree nursing as an act of listening and speaking with treelings. The work is part of Luis’ UmArts postdoctoral project "Of tree nurseries and remediating the colonial memory of landscapes", where he investigates tree nurseries between Puerto Rico, Denmark, and Sweden. The research looks at how tree nursing gives form and personhood to alternative, transhemispheric imaginaries that sidestep past and future colonial histories of landscape and of geoengineering. Luis is a Puerto Rican environmental artist and experimental architect, serving as associate professor at the Arkitekthögskolan.

The event will be part of Arboretets Dag, hosted by the staff and friends of Arboretum Norr. Luis' postdoc is in association with Bildmuseet and UMA, and is supported by Future Forests seed funding.

Lecture performance by invitation of The Forest Social lecture series invites Luis Berríos to review and renact sections of his performance "Ensayo de cuna a Guataúba // Rehearsing a lullaby to the herald of woe". Berríos Negrón conceived and performed this unrehearsed artwork with participations from the Umeå Barockkör and Copenhagen-based performer and activist Felix Becker in collaboration with Future Forests.

The performance took place at Umeå Plant Science Wallenberg Lab in December 2024 and is a research output of Berríos Negrón's UmArts postdoctoral project "Of tree nurseries remediating the colonial memory of landscapes" (2023–2024). The performance complements a final installation and publication that will be presented later in 2025 at Arboretum Norr with the support of Future Forests and Bildmuseet.

The following sound work is a debriefing of the public event “Hurricane Remediation” that was presented by the authors at the UmArts/VR Hurricanes and Scaffoldings conference of 2024. The soundwork begins with “El Cacique”, a conch shell piece by master Puerto Rican musician Dr. William Cepeda Román performed with his students in Loiza, Puerto Rico.[1] The parallel conch shell call and ensuing voices are set to a background recording titled “Morning sounds from Rio Maricao Forest Nature Reserve, Puerto Rico”, a biosphere that was hit particularly hard by Category 5 hurricanes Irma and María (September 5 & 19, 2017, respectively). The recording is by conservation biologist Omar Monzón Carmona,[2] and in it, birds such as the Puerto Rican Vireo (Vireo latimeri), Spindalis (Spindalis portoricensis), Woodpecker (Melanerpes portoricensis), Parrot (Amazona vittata), and the Bananaquit (Coereba flaveola),  among others, can be heard, or are mentioned during the soundwork by the authors. The voices are from the conference participants: marine biologist Juliann Rosado Pagán, curator Raquel Torres Arzola, and artists Karla Claudio and Luis Berríos Negrón (the latter as producer of the conference event, of this text and the soundwork).

In all, the work is set to reenact and review the breathless transhemispheric call and presentations performed at “Hurricane Remediation” during the conference. This becomes a backdrop to the way in which we want to position the word “hurricane”, which in English is drawn originally from Juracán—a force shared between the mythological triad of Guabancex, a high divinity of the Indigenous Taínos who lived across the Caribbean—a civilisation almost-eradicated during the early years of the invasion of the Americas (1492-ca. 1530). As it is common with many words, “hurricane” is loosely used by Western languages without reference to its ancestry or Indigenous context to represent the powerful, reoccurring storms specific to the Atlantic Ocean, as an analogy to impending doom. In the case of our role in the conference, we looked to re-position Juracán specifically in decolonial contrast to Nora Khan’s loose use of the word in her “Towards a Poetics…” essay that inspires the eponymous conference.[3] We challenge Khan and the conference to consider “hurricane”, not as “a most sublime metaphor” to prop up the plausible cataclysm of AI—or the future of the visual arts through artistic research—but as a force and divinity with far broader values that, through more careful consideration, may aid in better engaging environmental co-inhabitancy, as well as challenging the long-drawn void of colonial memory that continues to drive the hemispheric injustices of global warming. That is to say that “hurricane” is more than just an example of Western “symbolic language”. It is an ancestral and thermodynamic portal embodying the still deeply unresolved, unjust scars of colonial trauma. With that in our minds and between our bodies, we play this soundwork to ask the question: sublime to whom?

As environmental artists become increasingly drawn into research projects with the natural sciences, disruptions emerge in how mediation is defined and manifested. In that context, the following proposes a performed audiovisual essay that reflects research on how tree nurseries re-mediate an impassioned space arising from interdisciplinary collaboration and efforts to reinstate nature’s personhood.

The following proposes a performed, online, audiovisual essay that reflects research on how my recent arts research about Tree nurseries as spaces for personhood now turns towards the River as teacher. The essay begins by talking about how working with and learning from Tree nurseries emboldens and re-mediates impassioned spaces that encourage listening and learning to reinstate nature’s personhood. As mode to instigate these spaces of passion — of conflict, media and remedy — my postdoctoral work traces and reflects upon reforestation practices in Puerto Rico, Denmark and Sweden (see bio). Considering that reforestation seems to unwittingly be joining the hemispheric violences of scaleless geoengineering — as the prevalent reflex-response to the climate injustices of biodiversity loss and global warming — my research instead observes and senses the role of tree nurseries as transhemispheric sites for re-mediating colonial, spiritual and collaborative languages between trees, humans and landscapes. Now that the postdoctoral work ‘Of tree nurseries…’ (2023-25) is coming to an end, I now wish to turn those accrued insights, knowledges, and experiences towards a collective teaching and arts research project titled ‘Let the River speak’ (2022-ongoing) [see continuation in PDF]. 

Luis Berríos-Negrón presented his arts research work about climate and hemispheric injustuce in the context of colonialism. He compares Puerto Rico’s post-hurricane reforestations, Northern Sweden’s industrial and regenerative forestry, while referring to an ongoing art installation titled ‘Tormentera’ (Refuge, 2023-present) on the island of Møn, which is part of a broader art project titled Hosting Lands taking place across Denmark. He did so while reenacting segments of his performance at the Plant Science Centre titled ‘Canto de cuna para Guataubá’ (Lullaby to the Herald of Woe, 2024).

By contrasting three ongoing research projects along with complementary arguments, this paper explores mediating practices from environmental art and architecture perspectives in the context of industrial forestry and Sweden’s ‘green transition’. The general discourse on ‘green transitions’ significantly amplifies the cultural and economic values of forests within and beyond Sweden. This amplification turns forests into reflexive entities that compel broader value revisions, challenging the extractivist character of modern urbanism. An example is the recent public debate in Sweden about what distinguishes a ‘forest’ (skog) from a ‘plantation’ (plantage). The debate does not reinforce the binary divide between the terms. Instead, it is prompting renewed, if overdue, attention to suppressed Indigenous and rural ancestries, as well as to alternative narratives and techniques that rethink industrial forestry tropes. From that context, our arguments position our respective research works—regarding 1) tree nurseries and climate injustice, 2) the transnational timber industry, and 3) new resource economies for the built environment—in ways which form and encourage research intersections that recognize ancestral, physical, and temporal scales as a potential for enriching the model that is the Swedish ‘green transition’.

The lecture performance was part of Session T - Show and Tell of the Hurricanes and Scaffolding: Swedish Research Council's (Vetenskapsrådet's) Symposium on Artistic Research on 05.Decembre, 2024 at the Umeå Art Academy Gallery, Umeå University Arts Campus.

During the performance Negrón reflected on six Puerto Rican linoleum prints related to ‘Hurricane’ produced the 1950 & 60’s by Puerto Rican painter and graphic artist Carlos Raquel Rivera (artworks shown with permission from the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña). The works titled Hurricane from the North (1955) and Santa Clara (1957) are featured as both depict scenes hurricanes hitting the island while impacting the most vulnerable, the former specifying the hemispheric disparity of colonial empire as an overarching narrative of so much of Rivera's oeuvre. The performance continues Negrón's concern over ‘Hurricane’ as a peripheral semiotic form that bridges discourses across the hemispheres delimited by the Atlantic, between Europe and the Caribbean.