It seemed like an ordinary day for the inhabitants of Manhattan until walking they noticed that in the center of Madison Square Park something had changed: who put that forest there?
A GHOST FOREST has appeared in New York
# Maya Lin Ting’s installation
In the center of Madison Square Park 49 trees appeared overnight but there is an explanation. This forest is an installation that bears the signature of Maya Lin Ting, a famous American architect and landscape designer.
In 1982, she created the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington and it is again she, with this forest that appeared out of nowhere, the spokesperson for an important message.
#The Gost Forest
The forest opened on May 10 to remain open to citizens until November and is called the Ghost Forest.
Why this name? The ghost forest is intended to represent the damage created by climate change on nature.
Precisely for this reason it appears like this, under the astonished eyes of citizens who did not expect it, a bit like a bill to pay for all the wrong behaviors towards our planet.
The one recreated by Maya Lin Ting is in fact a still life, exhausted, an eyesore in comparison to the tulip fields and flowering trees that announce spring inside the park.
# A forest of killed trees
The installation in New York arrives suddenly, without giving any warning because this is how it happens with climate change: suddenly everything that has been done becomes the last straw that breaks the camel’s back, and everything changes.
The trees that make up the ghost forest are dead trees, killed by the fate that humans have helped to trace.
For the installation, the American designer went in search of trees killed by climate change. Those in Manhattan are 49 Atlantic cedars that come from the Pine Barrens forest of New Jersey, seriously at risk.
They are bare trees, placed there to be seen, to make people understand what we have done and what we are doing every day, a way to finally give a concrete image to our unsustainable lifestyle.
No more distant trees of who knows what city that no one sees, trees here, in front of the citizens, in one of the most beautiful parks in New York.
# A path to awareness
The ghost forest is a real forest that has rebuilt a path towards environmental and social awareness.
Not only the bare trees are there to testify their truth but also a path with different sounds and songs of animals. Sounds that, sooner or later, we will no longer hear, because they belong to animals that are now in danger of extinction.
This project tells the visible consequences of our behaviors that are now destroying the planet.
It is always thought that it is far away, and that we should not worry about it; if you don’t see it doesn’t concern us right?
What if tomorrow, out of the blue, all the ravages created by climate change were in the park behind our house?
ARIANNA BOTTINI
