Installation
The Breathless Forest
The Breathless Forest takes the form of a failed diorama, a three dimensional, life-size, simulated environment in which nature is put on display. By failing to immerse the viewer entirely in the illusion, The Breathless Forest explores “nature” as a construct embedded in the cultural, symbolic, and political orders of human history. Located on a busy street of Beirut, the installation offers a window through which the pedestrians can "peek into a dead forest". While dioramas offer ways to produce permanence, to stop decomposition and keep things from disappearing, in The Breathless Forest decay seem to have already taken place. In spite of the death, the skinning and the dismemberment of the taxidermy animals composing the diorama, their glass eyes succeed in returning our gazing.