Is it possible to promote new ways of being and living together beyond global hostility and competitiveness – even when this fact may already have been proven impossible? Are our bodies capable of negotiating and cooperating to reach agreement without giving up our inner dissent and differences? What practical, theoretical and symbolic agencies can we imagine through art in the midst of a socio-political context that is governed by rivalry and separation? 

Crown shyness is a natural phenomenon consisting of ach tree limiting the growth of its crown, making harmony possible in the forest canopy that enables species to coexist non-competitively. Among the reasons for this "awareness" there is the one related to the trees’ ability to exchange chemical signals that allows them to avert the spread of pests, diseases and environmental stress or may simply be a means of defining their space to grow. These natural infrastructures cause what are known as crown shyness gaps: gaps between the crowns of the trees slightly —if ever—touching one another; cracks, spaces of possibility.

The poetical observation of this natural phenomenon challenges modern thinking – based on the idea that everything in nature is reduced to a struggle for the survival of the fittest –and, therefore, it calls into question any justification of the savage competitiveness within the current socioeconomic framework that takes nature as a model. Quite the opposite, this natural collective intelligence, working for the common cause presents a dialogue with our contemporaneity and an alternative as a society to face the urgency in order to create ecosystems in which relations, encounters and exchange are yet based on synergies.

Taking this poetic metaphor as a starting point, Crown shyness is an exhibition that promotes and makes visible heterogeneous structures for everyday coexistence and learn from one another from otherness and difference. It is about rethinking the meaning and implication of a community today focusing on practices that contribute to a more open understanding of the common and create new scenarios of cohabitation where conflict, division and instability exist. Its concern is finding possibilities amidst the contemporary complexities and contradictions that allow us to cohabit and generate subtler and more flexible links with the other; shared weakness makes us stronger. We propose a more open and distorted glance at nature within a process that transcends the limits of scientific knowledge to more poetic and intuitive positions.

The works presented at MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Vigo, invite the public to feel one another, to become aware of one’s own body with relation to someone else’s in a given space-time, which is not indifferent to the vicissitudes concerning human relationships. The whole forms a social sculpture, which may remind us of the feeling that can be found during grassroots sit-ins and marches, where communication with others goes beyond words and finds its fullest expression in the union of bodies. Trees and individuals merge; they show their bodies day to day, yet they are not always visible. We now face the challenge of dreaming and building, in a joint effort, genuine spaces of critique, desire and transformation, while taking into account not only what brings us together but also what separates us. Why not start from a radical imaginary, or even a tale, if it provides a means to our end?

Beatriz Alonso