Old Snag

Critical text by Caterina Avataneo I usually disdain texts beginning with a definition, but Old Snag definitely demands one. Personally, I could imagine a “hey you!” just preceding it — the kind of expression muttered at the edge of a counter, directed toward some drunk man: a body gone crooked, inexplicably still standing. As it turns out, the term is not typically used for human beings. And yet, if it were, my intuition would not feel entirely misapplied. A snag, in forestry, is a standing dead tree: no longer alive in the biological sense but not yet absorbed back into the ground. A walking dead, in other words! No wonder every existing image of a haunted house includes somewhere in the background a lightning-struck trunk, twisted like a witch’s finger. Wait, hear this before you roll your eyes in disapproval of my fixation with the topic. What is important, and increasingly documented in ecological research, is that these dead standing trees are far from inert remnants. They function as active ecosystems, hosting nesting cavities for birds, shelter for insects, bats, microbial life, fungi, lichens, mosses, and a dense array of organisms that depend precisely on decomposition for vitality. In Ingeborg Tysse’s exhibition, an old snag appears within an analogous suspended ontology. Sourced from the area surrounding the gallery, the trunk is ceremonially positioned upright. With a pair of owl-looking wings that unfurl at its sides, it assumes a totemic presence. The effect is rather absurd and deliberately unsettling: the trunk is grounded, heavy with its own past, while the wings animate something expected to be devoid of life. The owl too carries a symbolic history, appearing across multiple folk traditions as a creature associated with death omens, obscure knowledge and the threshold between worlds. Other three monumental cherry trunks lie horizontally across the floor, dressed with Elizabethan and clerical collars, as well as belts. The arthritic dark-brown bark and the fleshy fungi bulging from it reveal that, when sourced, these trunks had already been reclaimed by the forest floor. Ecologically, they belong to another category altogether: deadwood, or downed logs. Typically, as moisture infiltrates deadwood from the soil below, moss spreads across its bark and fungi proliferate, while larvae and microbial colonies gradually convert wood into nutrient-rich organic matter, contributing to the slow release of carbon into the soil. A fundamental regenerative process indeed, one that makes the log uncomfortably close to a putrefying corpse. What disgusts us about the cadaver, writes Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, is its collapsing of categories we obsess on keeping separate: life and death, self and non-self, body and waste. The corpse is that which exceeds purity and containment — the most disturbing of residues in which life persists as something no longer recognisable as “self. ” Think about how we see our dead ones for the last time. It is usually at the funeral parlour: dressed, composed, cosmetically restored, the smell temporarily subdued, the body carefully adjusted into a final image of coherence before the coffin is sealed, and decomposition is removed from sight. What follows — the slow, irreversible transformation of the body into other forms of matter — is systematically withdrawn from the sphere of the living imagination. It is precisely within this logic that the Elizabethan ruffs and belts placed on her trunks resonate. Historically, ruffs functioned as devices of posture and class distinction, producing an image of elegance and aristocratic composure — while also, more implicitly, concealing the softening of the neck and the visible signs of bodily ageing in a pre-Botox era. Belts, too, operate through a similar logic of containment, framing another notoriously soft part of the body. In Tysse’s installation, these anthropic accessories, clumsily off-scale, resemble attempts to stabilise matter in the process of transformation, entering a rather intimate sphere of attachment, where decoration and maintenance become ways of staying with what is lost. The result is both tender and grotesque. As for the bird feathers in the standing trunk, they animate the logs, granting them personality. This is also evident in the pair of small bronze root-like sculptures, each adorned with a collar hat that gives them a lively appearance, as if caught dancing. Or are all these ruffs rather disclosing a whole bunch of beheaded creatures? The doubt can’t but hover in unresolved suspension... And of course, no parade of the dead would be complete without a ghost. A haunting cylindrical metallic grid rises in the space, shimmering with silver leaves that instil a spectral presence, bearing witness to those forms of disappearance that can no longer be kept at a distance, and allowing for extended grief. Tysse addresses the deeply human desire to preserve and immortalise, while simultaneously placing the death of ecological systems directly in front of us. In doing so, she also quietly invites to ponder on what is deemed worthy of preservation, and what is allowed to disappear unnoticed. The snag, after all, is not simply a lesser-known poetic symbol of mortality, but an increasingly vulnerable element within managed forests, where deadwood is often removed in the name of productivity. Together with this piece, two digital jacquard weavings introduce a synthetic dimension to the whole. Among dense branching tangles disclosing subterranean rib cages or ears popping out of wooden pockets, archaic trippy visions unfold. It’s the effect of the hallucinatory realisation that organic life has always communicated through hidden infrastructures exceeding individual bodies... and that the forest is very much alive (and dying) inside and outside us.