Visual Strolls

completing a cycle

For 10 years, between spring 2016 and spring 2026, Visual Strolls offered to meander through symbolic landscapes, inner wilderness and imagination. Being a space where artists who share an affinity for forests participated in custodianship of attention to the present moment and the possibles it reveals, it showcased selected works by artists who, at the turn of changing moments, were invited to bring a new season to Foresta by making a seasonal portrait of time, that then became part of the permanent Museum of Seasons.

Making a portrait is a relational gesture. Making a portrait of time extends relationality towards attunement. While it is still true that Foresta is continuously changing as the real forest does, and in cyclical circularity it celebrates changing seasons of the natural world and of our lives, we do notice that seasonal changes are no longer what they used to be for the first decade of Foresta’s life. As if the familiar four times of the year changes with varying temperature and length of daylight are shifting.

Therefore, the seasonal portrait as we knew it for 10 years is now completing its cycle. We warmly thank all the artists who have invited seasons to Foresta over this decade, whose agency went beyond thoughtful attentiveness and skill of expression, towards reflecting the future hidden in the possible of the present moment and how that particular time entered collective memory.

We are now thinking with the Japanese concept of MA, often (partially) understood as a meaningful pause, a space between things, a relational interval that makes relationship possible. It became our companion in this moment as we sense that a new rhythm and perception of time is evolving at Foresta. What is absent is not empty, it generates potential and allows for something yet unknown to appear.

Seasonality as perceived by Foresta today is potentially moving from another way of seeing to another way of sensing, where the visual sense is one of many, asking What rhythms are truly ours to recognize? We are taking time to inhabit the interval, to be with what has not yet found its form. Within this space, attuning to the generative quality of between-ness and learning to recognize a rhythm that has not yet revealed its cadence, listening.

Visual Strolls has not only been an online gallery, an exhibition room, a portrait into the work of the invited artists. 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 co-creation of culture. You can read more about Art into Life research here.