Fossilidades, REVELAR, Forest Design, fragment, Evgenia Emets and Te.Ra Landscape Architecture, 2026
Guardians of Future Forests: Evgenia Emet’s Holistic and Metaphysical “Eternal Forest” Project
Interview by Olivia Ann Carye Hallstein
When using both metaphysical (time, sound) and material manifestations (paper, trees, land) in space while creating your work, how do you know when it is all in sync? How does one element inform the other? Is there a sequence to your practice across these elements?
For me, these manifestations are intrinsically connected. Shifting between working with sound, symbols and color or trees, soil, and land is not a shift between worlds, but creating layered parts of the story, because they are part of the same continuum, different ways to explore reality. However, bringing these manifestations into the world from the idea space, there is always a filter based on our experiences and point of view.
But also the context of place and time, and how much awareness we bring into understanding this context. Think about different qualities of time: Kronos as linear time, Kairos as the present moment and cycles, and Aion as a more absolute or eternal time. My work constantly moves between these layers.
Most projects begin with embodying the space and coming out of Kronos into the space of Kairos - allowing the time to flow organically during the time of research, exploration and also creation. I walk the land, listen to its story, speak with the community, observe what is present in the land, and what the land is becoming.
From this, a vision forms, which can manifest into an experience, an artistic trail in nature, a design, and a landwork. In the case of Eternal Forest Sanctuaries, they are site-specific living sculptures, and they are a combination of all of the above. Every place where Eternal Forest is created has its own tempo, its own timefulness, its own density of memory. Only after tuning into these do I begin to translate what I perceive into drawing, geometry, language, and planting design. The land shapes the concept. The concept refines the intervention. What we call the material world: soil composition, water presence, sun and wind exposure - these are realities. They correct and ground the vision.
When everything is in sync, the work feels inevitable rather than constructed. I observe nature’s and the community's response. For example, in Pictote in Portugal, I conceived an Eternal Forest Grove—a community-stewarded small forest. The day after marking an eight-pointed star design on the ground, I saw a full rainbow exactly in that direction. I pay attention to such moments.
Eternal Forest Grove, Picote, Marco Piano, Eternal Forest, 2025
You mention deforestation and forest fires as some of the original drivers that have led to your Eternal Forest project. What was the realisation or experience that sparked this interest? And how has it transformed from focusing on the destruction to seeking solutions and planting trees?
In 2017, I experienced deep ecological grief in the aftermath of destructive fires in Portugal. The questions I held were: What collective wound was I feeling in our relationship with the forest? How did we create landscapes that are mostly productive, often highly extractive, where we leave almost no space for natural forest to thrive?
I did not want to focus only on devastation. I wanted to understand how, through art and connecting with communities, we can create and protect forests.
I traced back the memory of our ancestors who held the forests sacred. Sacred forests and groves exist in almost all cultures. Some survived, some were hidden, and many suffered with the spread of Christianity and later with colonisation and industrialisation. Yet they remain in people’s consciousness and can be traced through cultural research, such as sacred groves of India, Ethiopian sacred forests around churches, ancestral forest groves in Eastern Europe and many more.
Eternal Forest is about rebuilding emotional and spiritual connections between people and forests, while also creating physical spaces for biodiversity habitats. It is not only about planting trees, but about planting a seed of care in each community, so continuity can be carried across generations.
In the mission statement for the Eternal Forest project – i.e. creating 1000 sacred sanctuary forests for 1000 years and beyond human life – it seems to parallel the Indigenous concept of “Seven Generations” (J. Vukelich Kaagegaabaw 2024) held by Anishinaabe / Ojibwe tribes.
The idea of creating one thousand sanctuary forests for one thousand years is rooted in a long-term perspective. It resonates with the Seven Generation principle, thinking about the generations ahead and how the decisions we take today will affect them.
When working with plant species, I approach the question of native and non-native with care and humility. Native species are fundamental because they support insects, birds, fungi, and entire systems of interdependence locally in these places. At the same time, I recognize that landscapes are dynamic and they carry a long history of plants moving around the world, aided by human migration and increasingly shaped by a changing climate. In each location, I collaborate with local ecologists and botanists to understand what strengthens biodiversity and resilience to support the ecosystem in the long run.
My perspective has evolved from aesthetic intuition toward ecological dialogue. Each territory teaches me differently. My role is not to impose, but to adapt the vision of Eternal Forest to a specific place, culture, knowledge, and living ecosystem and create from a space of deep listening.
What do you envision for your work 5 years from now, 10, 20, 30, etc.? What do you hope the project will accomplish for the future generations who will experience it? In other words - What elements constitute a successful “Eternal Forest”?
In five years, I envision several Eternal Forest Sanctuaries rooted in distinct regions. We are actively working on connecting to landowners and stewards who are interested in creating forest sanctuaries with us and being part of the network. In ten years, I hope we have an established network - not only ecologically, but culturally - sharing research, artistic exchange, and stewardship practices.
In twenty or thirty years, success will not be measured by recognition, but by continuity. A successful Eternal Forest is one that no longer depends on who created it or external support. It becomes embedded within the community. It is running an effective cultural and artistic programme, and people are coming to visit, learn and carry the seeds of the knowledge to other places.
An Eternal Forest succeeds when it becomes part of our psyche, and it becomes a new normal to be guardians of forests.
As a localized and site-specific project with a collaborative mission that includes both the natural world and local community, what is your collaboration approach when working with a new community (of people and ecosystem)? What has worked and what hasn’t? How does your approach to people differ from or is similar to your approach to nature?
My approach to a new community is very similar to my approach to land. The first step is focused on listening. With people, this means conversations, shared walks, gatherings, and co-creation with art. The extension of the human community is a more-than-human world. With ecosystems, it means not only studying species composition, hydrology, soil structure, exposure, and existing ecological pressures, but listening to the land and its beings in an active, compassionate way as co-creators and co-inhabitants.
Eternal Forest Grove, Picote, Marco Piano, Eternal Forest, 2025
What has worked is patience and transparency. When communities feel that they are co-authors rather than spectators, the project gains depth. What has not worked in the projects I have observed is the top-down approach and speed. Regeneration cannot be rushed, and neither can trust. We choose to move slowly and take our time to understand, and while building trust, get people to really feel the ownership of what is being created.
6. Specifically, Fossilades has been planned in Torres Verdras as part of the project REVELAR at CAC Centro de Arte e Criatividade, curated by Jorge Reis and opening in March in an exhibition titled A Memória Dos Pássaros Que Não Voam. What has this collaboration taught you? How did you research plant species to ensure regional biodiversity? What are you most excited about for the exhibition?
Fossilades emerged from a linguistic crossing between fóssil and possibilidade (fossil and possibility in Eng). When I was invited to create work for the REVELAR project, I chose my point of departure - a fossilised trunk of an ancient Araucaria found in the territory. Witnessing millions of years, it asks whether this memory of deep time can become a catalyst for ecological imagination.
The project unfolds in two directions. One is a film installation created in collaboration with Marco Piano, presented at the exhibition. Five women exist in the forest in cyclical time. Their gestures are ritualistic, dissolving the boundary between body and woodland. It is a communion, a reenactment of becoming one with the forest.
The second dimension is architectural and ecological. I mapped the oval arena of the former bullring through the quality of reflectivity in an ellipse. Using its two foci (ellipse focal points), I positioned symbolic nodes as offering places for fire and water elements, then traced intersecting lines to generate planting coordinates.
Fossilidades, REVELAR, Performance, CAC, Marco Piano, 2026
I began with the data available in the region for biodiversity research. And we also received 75 trees from the local Municipality - all suited to the local climate and ecology. I complemented them with shrubs and medicinal plants that historically existed in the territory but were reduced through intensive agriculture. My intention in restoration work is to maximize habitat potential - layering canopy, understory, and ground cover.
What excites me most about this project is revealing myths within the land and creating a new story that can be shared by the community and be enacted collaboratively, if people choose to become guardians of the proposed community forest. That is when the work is completed.
Fossilidades, REVELAR, Performance, CAC, Marco Piano, 2026
