Trees hold within them particular modes of time – deep time, future time, their own lifecycles, evidence of environmental and climate changes recorded in earth years, and through human interaction with them, the multigenerational lives of people.

Tree Time looks at the specific relationship trees have with expansive notions of time as a useful tool for thinking about and re-understanding human relationships with the natural environment, ecological complexity, and imagining the future. We hosted public events at TACO! exploring value ascribed to both trees in the context of an urgent climate crisis; the role of financial capitalism, green economies and neoliberal life in contributing to or mitigating climate change.

Talking Time was an afternoon of talks and discussion about human relationships with perceptions and models of time, including capitalist time, neoliberal time, deep time, crisis time, and tree time, with Chamkaur Ghag, professor of physics at UCL, Chiara Famengo, a curator and researcher working at the intersection of art and ecology, and artist Dean Kenning.

Listen to the radio show we made for RTM.FM featuring walks around Thamesmead and Abbey Wood, where our guests reflected upon their relationship the natural environment. Hear Aruhan Galieva, a British-Kazakh actor, comedian, and activist, Ian Holt, Estate Manager of Lesnes Abbey Woods, Debo Adegoke, an Nigerian-born artist living in Thamesmead, and Camilla Allen, a landscape architect and environmental historian who shares ideas from her book The Politics of Street Trees, during a public walk around Thamesmead. Also Noah, Eva, and Stephen who contributed to the discussion during the public walk.

Tree Time draws on the specific urban context of Thamesmead and its history as London’s ‘new town’ directly adjacent to the ancient forest of Lesnes Abbey Wood. Thamesmead’s brutalist architecture and social housing incorporates modernist principals in its design  – including the ‘civilized subject’ and a particular relationship with the natural environment – such as waterways, parks and the separation of cars and pedestrians. Thamesmead was built in a low-lying former marshland and a climate vulnerable area. 50 years after its founding its is characterised as an area with an ethnically diverse population, undergoing extensive social and economic change, that is driven by the development of new transport infrastructure and the building of new homes. As the biggest regeneration project in London, and one of the biggest in the UK, it is a place where the future is being thought about and imagined. Tree Time is predicated on the possibility of practical physical change undertaken locally by local people. It sets out to explore the psychological challenge that the magnitude of the reality of climate change presents.

Commissioned by TACO!, with thanks to Mat Jenner