NEWS How can art shift our perception of forests鈥攆rom raw material to living companions? Through installations and performances in Umeå and abroad, Puerto Rican artist and architect Luis Berríos-Negrón, associate professor at Umeå School of Architecture, explores ways of listening to, nurturing, and co-existing with trees. His work opens new spaces for reckoning with the climate crisis, industrialisation, and colonialism, while reimagining reforestation as a cultural and relational practice.
In December 2024, Berríos-Negrón transformed the UPSC Wallenberg Tree Phenotyping Platform—generally reserved for highly technical plant research—into a space of art and encounter. His performance Guataubá unfolded as a multisensory tree nursery, where sound, movement, and choral voices invited the audience to imagine trees as sentient beings rather than economic resources. Collaborating with Copenhagen-based artist Félix Becker and the Umeå Barockkör, he blurred the boundaries between science and ritual, observation and care.
Caudex at Arboretum Norr, located in the neighbourhood of Baggböle in Umeå.
Image Luis Berríos-NegrónEarlier this year, Berríos-Negrón unveiled Caudex at Arboretum Norr in Baggböle, Umeå. Developed together with Arboretum staff, the installation is designed as a long-term support structure for “tree nursing”—the practice of listening to and caring for young treelings. To inaugurate this living infrastructure, he staged the performance Trophic Auscultation, featuring local musicians who played alongside the trees in acts of attunement and reciprocity. The work highlights the importance of collaboration between artists, scientists, and the wider community in shaping more sustainable relations with nature.
“For me, tree nursing is not only about nurturing diversity for young trees, but about learning, again, how to live in co-inhabitancy with forests. It’s a practice of personhood—listening, caring, and recognising that trees are as much actors as humans are in our shared future,” says Luis Berríos-Negrón
Luis Berrios-Negrón.
Image Freia Pilar Negrón LarsenThese works build on Berríos-Negrón’s postdoctoral research, which compares reforestation efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria (2017–2022) with initiatives in Denmark and Sweden. While replanting trees is often framed as a technical fix for global warming and a cornerstone of the “Green Transition,” his work raises deeper questions: Whose knowledge counts in these processes? How can reforestation respond to biodiversity loss without repeating industrial and colonial patterns? By placing different regions in dialogue, he highlights how art can open new ways of seeing and practising reforestation beyond economic and technocratic frames.
For me, tree nursing is not only about nurturing diversity for young trees, but about learning, again, how to live in co-inhabitancy with forests.
Across installations, performances, and video essays, Berríos-Negrón develops what he calls “tree nursing” as both a gesture and a method. By attending to trees as co-actors, his work reimagines reforestation as a geo-aesthetic practice under revision—one that listens to landscapes, acknowledges colonial trauma, and nurtures rituals of care across borders and species. This perspective invites us to rethink not only how forests are managed, but also how humans situate themselves in relation to the more-than-human world.
Later this autumn, Berríos-Negrón will present these works at the 6th International Geomedia Conference in Karlstad, bringing Umeå’s art–science collaborations into an international dialogue.
