ABOUT ARTIST:

Jamal Ageli is a German photographer and video artist based between Frankfurt(Main) and Amsterdam. His works are shaped by an early love for optics and light, growing up in nature and the urge to find the most extraordinary aspects of our existence on this planet. By observing science and technology that shape our future as well as the beauty of the natural world, his vision leads him to create images full of colour, contrast and abstraction that reveal the scale of life and our relationship with the surrounding world.

SUBMISSION: Cosmic Tree

The artwork “Cosmic Tree” reflects on the exponential transformation of a forest landscape sculpted by climate change and extreme weather phenomena.

Every second, forests are being cut down and burnt to ashes solely driven with profit in mind. They exhaust their spirits in the atmosphere from where they watch us beating on the soil, year in year out. How did we get here? Plants were so essential for the development of our cosmology, crucial to our spirituality and human intelligence. For millions of years, plants shaped the formation of our tribes, villages and civilisations. In all of these civilisations, the human condition has always been expressed through the image of a plant: The cosmic tree as the source of all life throughout cultures and their cosmology.

This unique symbol has been abolished by colonial and hierarchical ideas of domination which have increasingly degenerated our relationship with plants to the point where we are today.

Plants have been degraded to a commodity and resource to be consumed. The mystical and magical grounds that the forests have offered to our civilisation are long erased and have been exchanged for lumber plantations of fast growing tree monocultures. The spirits of the soil seem lost.

A storm has ended this tree’s life. Today it will transcend to the heavens and live forever to warn us about our common origin, the cosmic tree that makes all life possible on this planet.
A three-dimensional digital wood print engraved in pure quartz glass to continue the cosmic tree’s life on the Moon and throughout the Universe.