Following a successful showing during CTM 2020 week, the commissioned work by Maria Thereza Alves and Lucrecia Dalt will continue to be presented at the Botanic Garden Berlin from 24th of January until 16th of February (daily, 9am - 7pm). The spatial sound installation “You Will Go Away One Day But I Will Not” considers the Western practice of using Western scientific nomenclature to name plants worldwide. The audience is invited to walk through the tropical greenhouse wearing headphones that track each user’s movements to generate individualised binaural sonic experiences. Through this immersive installation in the tropical greenhouse, Alves and Dalt attempt to open a space for the multifarious voices of the forest—organic and inorganic, human and non-human, speculative and lived—while also pointing to their silencing and erasure by European colonists.

Alves has worked with the Guarani people of the Jaguapiru Reservation in Dourados in Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil since 1980. She asked longtime collaborator, Guarani teacher, and local reservation leader Maximino Rodrigues and his community to begin this conversation with her; plants were named and honoured with songs. For instance, the community named what we know as Nymphoides humboldtiana with Yvoty mboporã pónhuregua, meaning “five-sided flower of the spirit of the fields and forests: you will go away one day but I will not.”

The work is presented within the framework of the “Natur. Nach Humboldt” initiative, a project celebrating the 250th anniversary of Alexander von Humboldt by presenting modern perspectives on the scientist and naturalist’s holistic approach to nature.