Visual Strolls
online seasonal residency
Visual Strolls is a residency space for artists who share an affinity for landscapes and wilderness, inner and outer. La Foresta is changing with every season as the real forest does. In cyclical circularity it celebrates changing seasons of nature and of our lives. As snow melts away, as days grow longer, as leaves change colour, as they fly with the wind, as stillness settles in, as warmth returns, as birds cross continents — at the turn of each seasonal moment we invite a different artist to bring a new time of the year by creating a portrait of time that later becomes part of the permanent Museum of Seasons.
Winter 2021/2022 Artist in Residence
Armando Fonseca
Armando is an illustrator with strong roots in philosophy, based in Mexico. During his residency in winter 2022 Armando was part of the co-creators team at Foresta Seasonal Academy for Relational Space trail.
Winter Portrait 2021/2022
“El claro del bosque es un centro en el que no siempre es posible entrar; desde la linde se le mira y el aparecer de algunas huellas de animales no ayuda a dar ese paso. Es otro reino que un alma habita y guarda. Algún pájaro avisa y llama a ir hasta donde vaya marcando su voz. Y se la obedece; luego no se encuentra nada, nada que no sea un lugar intacto que parece haberse abierto en ese solo instante y que nunca más se dará así. No hay que buscarlo. No hay que buscar. Es la lección inmediata de los claros del bosque: no hay que ir a buscarlos, ni tampoco a buscar nada de ellos. Nada determinado, prefigurado, consabido […] Y queda la nada y el vacío que el claro del bosque da como respuesta a lo que se busca. Mas si nada se busca, la ofrenda será imprevisible, ilimitada. Ya que parece que la nada y el vacío -o la nada o el vacío- hayan de estar presentes o latentes de continuo en la vida humana. Y para no ser devorado por la nada o por el vacío haya que hacerlos en uno mismo, haya a lo menos que detenerse, quedar en suspenso, en lo negativo del éxtasis.”
“The clearing of the forest is a centre that is not always possible to enter; you see it from the edge and the appearance of some animal tracks does not help you to take that step. It is another realm that a soul inhabits and guards. Some bird warns and calls to go as far as its voice goes. And you obey; then you find nothing, nothing but an untouched place that seems to have opened up in that single instant and that will never be like that again. You don’t have to look for it. You don’t have to search. This is the immediate lesson of the forest clearings: you don’t have to go looking for them, and you don’t have to look for anything about them. Nothing determined, prefigured, known [...] And there remains the nothingness and emptiness that the clearing of the forest gives as an answer to what is sought. But if nothing is sought, the offering will be unpredictable, unlimited. For it seems that nothingness and emptiness - or nothingness or emptiness - must be continually present or latent in human life. And in order not to be devoured by nothingness or emptiness, one has to make them in oneself, one has at least to stop, to remain in suspense, in the negative space of ecstasy.”
About Visual Strolls
Visual Strolls is not only an online gallery, an exhibition room, a portrait into the work of the invited artist. It is also a part of our long-term research, understanding arts and creativity as forces that change human states of attention in manifold ways, as forms of cognition and perception, divergent perspectives and poetry of vision, access to intuition and imagination, and empowerment for conscious creation of culture. You can read more about Art into Life research here.
Cover image: Armando Fonseca