Announcer: This is a Getty podcast.
[Rising, meditative music]
Lilit Sadoyan: Hello, I’m Lilit Sadoyan, the host of
OMMM, Our Museum Mindfulness Meditation podcast,
Getty’s first video podcast.
Welcome to the Deeper Dive, where we explore the themes
of our weekly episodes with experts in everything
from paintings conservation to mountain climbing.
Aroussiak Gabrielian: All of these lenses were attempts at
getting us to really see not only the intelligence and the
agency, but really to see the tree as another living being.
Sadoyan: This week, we did a grounding tree meditation
inspired by Théodore Rousseau’s Forest of Fontainebleau, Cluster
of Tall Trees Overlooking the Plain of Clair-Bois
at the Edge of Bas-Bréau.
I spoke with landscape architect and artist, Aroussiak
Gabrielian, to understand more about how we as humans can build
personal relationships to trees and the landscapes around us.
Now, let’s dive in.
[on video call] Aroussiak, thank you so much
for joining me today.
Gabrielian: Of course.
Thank you for having me.
Sadoyan: So the reason why I thought of you in connection
with this episode was because you designed a happening
at the Getty Center in connection with Earth Month.
So can you start off by telling us more about that work?
Gabrielian: So the piece that I staged at the Getty Garden
for Earth Day activation was a meditation, a guided meditation
with a tree, of a particular tree, a Peruvian pepper tree
that’s in the garden at the Getty, and it was about a
20-minute guided meditation.
And one of the things I was responding to is this notion
of plant blindness, which is a cognitive bias that we
humans have in relation to the biophysical world, and
particularly plant matter, where we do not necessarily
see the intelligence and the agency of species, um, of
particular and specific species.
Everything kind of blends into a background condition
for us, a background noise.
And as a piece within a larger body of work that stages
encounters, very intimate encounters with biophysical
matter, the piece for me was about attuning ourselves to
the intelligence of this tree.
And intelligence here I was looking through multiple lenses.
Um, there was a kind of scientific angle that the
meditation took us through to really understand the—what we
were hearing in terms of the internal sounds of the tree.
It was speaking about a kind of spiritual angle by looking
at what the tree has meant to the indigenous cultures, where
the tree has originated from and how it was used for them.
It went through also philosophical questions, and all
of these lenses were attempts at getting us to really see not
only the intelligence and the agency, but really to see the
tree as another living being, and to connect with it on a
really bodily, um, bodily level.
Bodily level, but also intellectual level.
It was trying to fire at all, kind of—trying to do
multiple things at once.
But the goal was to really attune ourselves
to the intelligence and to the agency of this as
a living, sensing being.
Sadoyan: That’s incredible, and actually something that
really resonated with me about your work is that kinship
that we have with trees, that they’re, you know, sensorily
alive co-beings and not just objects in a landscape to
be perceived, but that, you know, we have this reciprocal
embodied relationship with them.
Which is also what reminded me of this—the painting
for this week’s episode, Théodore Rousseau’s Forest
of Fontainebleau, and how he just immersed himself
in nature and incessantly sketched from the landscape
in which he found himself.
Um, so I’m wondering then how it is that you came to
do this work and what informs your—both your academic work
and your artistic practice?
Gabrielian: Great question.
I think… in retrospect, reflecting back on the
influences that brought me to, um, having an interest
in the biophysical world and landscape in particular, I think
there’s been multiple places and sources of inspiration
on an intellectual level.
But on a personal level, I, you know, I was born in
Armenia, in the capital, in Yerevan, and I grew up
with my grandparents and my grandfather in particular, who
spent most of his youth in the southernmost town of Armenia
bordering Iran, actually.
It’s the last town before the Araks River,
across which is Iran.
It’s a completely different ecological and
climactic context there.
But the people there are very land-oriented.
Um, there’s a lot of land-based practices that he grew up with.
And wanting us to experience both ways of life, we...you
know, we spent half the year living in the city of Yerevan
where we went to school, where they worked, and then half
the year in the mountains and forests of Dilijan, where
we grew everything we ate.
And it was really remarkable on two levels.
One was observing the elders in my household tending to
the land, which was very ritualistic, very embodied,
and it was, you know, also very precise in terms of the science
required for particular species to grow and to sustain us.
And on the other hand, being able to, and allowed to, wander
in nature, in the forest, in the density of the thicket of the
forests in Dilijan, which if you know the geography, it’s a kind
of a really mystical part of the country, usually covered in fog.
There’s a lot of swamps, a lot of wild mushrooms.
There’s a lot of mushroom foraging.
And, you know, I just spent hours kind of in my own world,
immersed in the forest, and I think both of those, uh, were
very formative experiences in shaping not only my worldview
and understanding of me and the world, but also my
interest towards nature and natural systems and ecologies.
So those would be the original, probably, seeds
that brought me to where I am.
Sadoyan: Sounds awe-inspiring and I can imagine how
influential that was for you.
Um, funnily enough, Rousseau also, before moving permanently
and settling permanently in Barvazan, summered near the
forest of Fontainebleau and then retreated to the city,
to Paris, during the winter.
So he, too, was splitting his time.
Gabrielian: Interesting.
Sadoyan: Finally, I’m wondering if you could leave
us with an exercise, perhaps something you do yourself,
as a means to connect with trees or with nature.
Gabrielian: Probably not something specifically
tree-oriented, but one of the things I have my students
do as they are tasked
with representing the dynamism of the natural world, the
fact that it’s changeable, the fact that, that there’s
seasonalities, um, is
to really—and they have to, you know, document and
represent that in multiple ways.
But one of the things I ask them to do is really to slow down
and change the temporality that we’re used to functioning and
moving through the world with.
And I don’t know if
you remember this, but during the COVID lockdown where
life slowed down, because we were forced to, there were so
many people who were finally noticing things that were
always in their surroundings but that they had never slowed
down to actually notice.
And there’s, I think, a real power to shifting the lens
through which we look at the world and operate in the world.
So changing the temporality that we typically move through the
world with, slowing down, and really observing and witnessing
that which is in front of us, does so much in terms of
perceptual, kind of, sharpening and attunement, to really
notice how light is hitting a particular leaf, the angle of
a particular branch, the insect that might land there for a
split second and then fly off.
These things are, I think, so valuable in understanding not
only, uh, the kind of ecosystems that surround us, but how
everything is interconnected and how everything kind of works
together and in support of each other in the biophysical world.
Sadoyan: Yeah, and really allowing ourselves to
be moved by it, right?
Gabrielian: Yes, exactly.
Sadoyan: Yeah.
Well, thank you so much for sharing your insights.
I hope that our visitors will come and slow down
with Rousseau’s painting.
But thank you so much again, Aroussiak, for
joining us for this episode.
Gabrielian: Of course.
Thank you so much for having me.
[Theme music plays]
Sadoyan: To find the related meditation and see images,
transcripts, and additional resources, visit our website
at Getty dot edu slash OMMM.
That’s O-M-M-M.