Crystal forest

Crystal Forest is a body of linked works and works-in-progress that consider how to represent the Amazon in light of its multiplicity of refracted meanings. Sayler/Morris spent four months in Ecuador doing fieldwork in the Amazon, attracted to the country’s constitution, which affords certain rights to nature and natural entities, as well as some degree of sovereignty to indigenous peoples in the Amazon:

Crystal Forest consists of:

• Edifice, a series of original hand-cut photographic collages along with non-collaged photographs of a building in the Ecuadorian Amazon that housed a now-defunct university.

• Manifest, a series of original hand-cut photographic collages that incorporate original images of the Amazonian rainforest with images drawn from National Geographic magazines from the 1970’s and before, as well as from botanical collections that taxonomize and order the species of the Amazon.

• Prophecy of Butterflies, an animated video loop conceived as a large-scale '“painting in motion.”

• The Amazon is Elsewhere, a short, dream-like film that mediates on the unknowability of the Amazon for a non-native person.

The Amazon, of course, is impossible to represent fully as it is the name of a vast region of diverse ecosystems, climates, people and other beings. The very word, “Amazon”acts on the imaginaries of myriad people and cultures throughout the world. For many, Amazon symbolizes “the lungs of the earth” or “nature” itself. However, for someone like Werner Herzog the Amazon is “obscene,” as he said in a famous interview. For the indigenous people of the region, many of whom have no separate word for jungle or forest, it is simply home.