Teresa Castro examines Clare Langan’s film The Heart of a Tree (2020) while situating it in a wider conversation about the speculative possibilities of science fiction in imagining humanity’s future amidst the major threats posed the environmental crises facing the world.

Clare Langan, The Heart of a Tree, 2020. Photograph, Digital Print on Archival Photographic Paper. Edition of 6. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

“In science fiction it’s always about now,” advocates Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, adding: “What else could it be about? There is no future. There are many possibilities, but we do not know which one we are going to have.”¹ Atwood is right of course: science fiction has always been about the present, as Clare Langan’s The Heart of a Tree (2020) perfectly illustrates. Set in a barren treeless landscape, the film’s inhospitable world evokes, at first glance, what could be a foreign, unwelcoming planet—a planet to which three astronaut-like figures cling with great difficulty, challenged by vertiginous climbs and the gusts of high winds. Is this a world they came to colonize once Earth became uninhabitable? Or could they be roaming Earth itself? Despite the uncanny upside-down perspectives, the loss of the sense of scale and the puzzling reverse motion of water, the lunar landscape feels terrestrial. It could be Earth: an estranged Earth, calcinated and gray, enveloped in the darkness of ashes and plunged into an eternal winter. In sum, a planet radically transfigured by climate change and environmental collapse. A mineral wasteland with no trees, no shrubs, no visible flora, except for the algae-like seedlings that the three humans carefully plant in the shore of a black sand beach. The mysterious ritual they perform, at times scanning the wind and the soil with perfectly synchronized moves, seems to confirm that this must be Earth after all. The astronauts are no space travelers: they resemble what French philosopher Bruno Latour has named “the Earthbound.”² Distinct from the human as Anthropos, the Earthbound (a new people coming into being today) bear witness to a major anthropological change: the refusal of the outdated Cartesian view according to which humans (culture) and nature are distinct.

THE HEART OF A TREE IS THE THIRD IN A SERIES OF FIVE FILMS GATHERED UNDER THE TITLE NEW EDEN, EXPLORING THE MAJOR THREATS POSED BY THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES FACING THE WORLD. WE CAN SEE THEM AS CLIMATE FICTIONS, ARTISTIC WORKS ENGAGING WITH THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY AND OFTEN SPECULATING ON HUMANITY’S IMAGINABLE FUTURES, AS WELL AS ON THE POSSIBILITIES FOR STORYTELLING IN THE ERA OF GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE.

Clare Langan, The Heart of a Tree, 2020. Film Still, Digital Print on Archival Photographic Paper. Edition of 6. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

The Heart of a Tree is the third in a series of five films gathered under the title New Eden, exploring the major threats posed by the environmental crises facing the world.³ We can see them as climate fictions, artistic works engaging with the climate emergency and often speculating on humanity’s imaginable futures, as well as on the possibilities for storytelling in the era of global climate change. As a genre affiliated with science fiction, climate fictions are resolutely about the present. To quote another science fiction writer, the US Kim Stanley Robinson, climate fiction “is the realism of our time . . . it gives us metaphors and meaning-systems to help conceptualize our moment.”⁴ It might appear surprising to think of Langan’s films and their poetic impressions as realistic; the graphic starkness of the filmmaker’s black-and-white shots that sometimes verge toward abstraction (like in The Heart of a Tree), as well as her atmospheric use of sound and music, seem very far from realism. But the latter refers here to a way of thinking that acknowledges that the planet, impelled by intense human activities, is undergoing a profound transformation. In this sense, Langan’s work couldn’t be more realistic.

Clare Langan, Future Primal, 2018. Film still, Digital Print on Archival Photographic Paper. Edition of 6. Courtesy of the artist.

More obviously, Langan’s New Eden series brings to mind anticipatory and speculative fabulations: a type of fiction that not only manages to unfold new worlds, but also brings forth possibilities that are already contained in our own world—like the Earthbound people. It’s in this speculative sense that we can approach The Heart of a Tree: What would it mean to live in a treeless planet? A planet with less available oxygen, shrouded in perpetual smog; a planet where large amounts of carbon would run into the oceans, causing extreme acidification; a planet of eroded soils, where neither plants nor animals nor fungi could survive? Life might have begun in the ocean (the “primordial soup” that we glimpse at the end of the film and that Langan evokes in Future Primal [2018]), but without early plant life, the oxygenation of Earth’s atmosphere would not have happened. As Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia observes, plants are the “most subtle artisans of our cosmos.”⁵ Trees are the breath of life, the living partners without whom human life would not be possible. According to Langan’s film, life in a treeless planet would mean a continuing attempt to grow trees again. Nothing would be more vital, if not sacred, as hinted at by an intriguing shot where the three human figures stare toward the sky, briefly catching sight of an eerie apparition: The ghost of a tree? Throughout the film, the humans proceed with the utmost care, as if performing a meticulously devised ritual. They seem to be simultaneously grieving with Earth and seeking to reconstruct life in a ruined, but still living, planet. The Earthbound don’t situate human life outside or above nature: they think of it in ecologically embodied and embedded ways. The Earthbound are about attachment—as Latour writes, “I have chosen Earthbound—‘bound’ as if bound by a spell, as well as ‘bound’ in the sense of heading somewhere, thereby designating the joint attempt to reach the Earth while being unable to escape from it.”⁶     

Clare Langan, The Heart of a Tree, 2020. Film Still, Digital Print on Archival Photographic Paper. Edition of 6. Courtesy of the artist. Fondazione In Between Art Film Collection

Paraphrasing Donna Haraway, trees (like the corals that the US philosopher considers in Staying with the Trouble) “helped bring the Earthbound into consciousness of the Anthropocene in the first place.”⁷ Deforestation (in particular of the Amazon rainforest, fantasmatically conceived as “the lungs of the world”) and bleached corals encapsulate the exterminating forces that shape our current times, with its swathes of predatory industries. But trees—and especially forests, understood as multispecies forms of collective, cooperative, and ungovernable life—are also the token of a different relationship to the world, one where the boundaries of the Anthropos become porous.⁸ If trees are the conspicuously absent visual element in The Heart of a Tree, the forest is there as a latent, productive desire, surging up in the shape of the unusual collection of algae-like shrubs carefully planted by the sea. In this sense, The Heart of a Tree’s grieving dimension should not be mistaken for a dystopian vision. As suggested by the three human figures in the film, mourning the irreversible loss of pristine waters, airs, and lands goes hand in hand with envisaging our dependence on the countless others that surround us. The Heart of a Tree is about the very possibility of life in a damaged planet.