Walking, City Lights, & Tree Spirits

My name is Sara and my senior project is Walking, City Lights, and Tree Spirits. Having been raised among the greenery of DC, I have always wondered about and felt inclined to explore the human relationship to nature. In middle and high school, I found photography and video have offered me a way to represent my life in a way I didn’t previously know how to express. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about growing up, my Chilean roots, and the spiritual and scientific significance of forests. My senior project combined walking, ecofeminism, meditation, and photography and culminated in a multimedia book with photography, writing, and video. In my photography, I aim to capture the most exciting and scariest parts of growing up. Sharing these experiences allows me to pass down feminine energy of love and yearning and growing up — one that I feel is so magical I sometimes want to grasp onto it forever.

For my senior project, I attempted to live in the spirit of Thoreau’s essay Walking, where he takes long walks alone to look inward and let go of the worries of the modern day. My question became is it possible to reconnect to the inner transcendentalist in the long walks through nature described in Thoreau’s essay Walking — and what can nature teach us about self reflection, artmaking, and spirituality?”  French feminist author Francoise d’Eaubonne coined the term ecofeminism in her book La Feminisme ou la Mort. Ecofeminism uses the concept of gender to analyze relationships between humans and the natural world. Intrigued by this genre of thought, which places importance on the healing of nature in order to heal the larger oppression within human societies, I began my own journey. Many days were spent walking in Central Park, Prospect Park, and Tompkins Square Park with my film camera. Other days I spent meditating, reading, journaling, and creating art. I developed my film and created a photography book that depict my experience. I also have multimedia projects that mix journaling and photos to represent my deepest thoughts, questions, and observations from my New York City park journeys. I used the juxtaposition of the natural landscapes next to the grittiercity photos to show the differences between the two settings that surround us in NYC. Many of the images share a common theme of questioning what is natural. I found to appease humanness as the source of this naturalness, I incorporated human bodies. Inspired by writers like Henry David Thoreau, Susan Sontag, and Susan Griffin, and artists like Ram Dass and Ana Mendieta, I incorporated their philosophies and artistic styles into my journaling and multimedia artwork. 

Thoreau expressed the importance of long walks through nature for his own peace of mind. Susan Griffin emphasized a connection between the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature. I, as an 18 year old girl, living in New York, combined my love of these ideas along with my own experiences growing up to shape my understanding of the concept of “natural.” I created a video that touches on these subjects, specifically exploring what does it mean to grow up as a woman and find yourself lost within nature, yet leave and experience the raw, gritty beauty and humanity of the city, all at once? I found on my walks that I felt more grounded, aware, and observant. 

I used Bookwright software to create my book and I used Adobe Premiere Pro to edit and construct my video. My video is a compilation of found footage, photos, archival footage, and music that I combined to tell a story about a girl walking through NYC. Please follow the [above/beow] link to my gallery, where you can find the book, the video, and other artwork and pieces that show the evolutionary process of my project. 

In my final days of my project, I learned how walking is not a task or merely an act but a way of life. In walking through forests, Thoreau points out that we become the forest. We become part of the larger evolutionary cycle of life which we so often forget we are a part of. The art of walking is in itself an act of love because we allow ourselves to exist in the present moment of all living things. My journey has taught me that it is possible to find peace within the urban jungle, if only you go out to seek it. Whenever I need to refresh, I go on a long walk. I look past the traffic sounds and look past the city lights. I keep walking, and if I listen closely enough, if my heart is open to them, I can almost sense tree spirits somewhere along the way.

https://sarabrodsky66.wixsite.com/walking