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AVIVA RAHMANI - BLUED TREES

Blued Trees Symphony

The Blued Trees Symphony launched on the Summer Solstice, June 21, 2015, with an overture in Peekskill, New York. It is now installed in many miles of proposed pipeline expansions, and each 1/3 measure of those miles has been copyrighted for protection. Variations of each movement are based on an iterative score created for the overture. All installations are created at the invitation of landowners. The overture was accompanied by an international Greek Chorus at a total of twenty sites internationally. Individual trees were painted and musical variations of the score were performed to echo the theme of connectivity to all life. The score is simultaneously spatial and acoustic and will conclude with a coda, a final movement that recapitulates and resolves previous themes, on the American presidential Election day, November, 2016.
The Peekskill site was chosen because the pipelines would be 105 feet from the infrastructure of the failing Indian Point nuclear facility, 30 miles from New York City. The score corresponds to a pattern that prevents the movement of heavy machinery. The paint for each vertical sine wave is a casein slurry of non-toxic Ultramarine blue and buttermilk that grows moss (based on a Japanese gardening technique).




The relationship between art and law in the United States often seems to be characterized by the latter settling issues about the production and consumption of the former. Artists and consumers have taken to the courts to settle issues about the boundaries of obscenity, fair use and various other issues. A large part of what makes eco-artist Aviva Rahmani’s Blued Trees captivating is Rahmani’s desire to flip the script and use art as a tool to achieve legal gains.
This is not to say that Blued Trees is purely a legal maneuver. The work, which consists of “tree ‘notes’” painted with a “slurry of non-toxic ultramarine blue pigment and buttermilk” to “form discreet 1/3 mile long ‘measures’ in the symphony,” functions on multiple levels: musical, spatial, visual. Yet, Rahmani and her collaborators’ acute attention to specific legal details feels defiant and empowering. Rahmani, however, might say that the fact that using the legal system for the benefit of everyday citizens seems like a special act is strange in the first place. During an email correspondence, Rahmani stated to me that many activists are “baffled by a judicial system that seems rigged as never before, against honest citizens protesting injustice.”
Rahmani and her collaborators specifically seek to prevent private corporations from gaining eminent domain in order to construct natural gas pipelines on private property. As noted in the Blued Trees Symphony and Greek Chorus manual — a document created members of the advocacy group Save Burden Lake and expanded by Rahmani — eminent domain may be delegated by legislatures to “third parties, who will devote it to public or civil use or, in some cases, to economic development.” Blued Trees seeks to counter the latter case. The Blued Trees manual notes that the site of the Blued Trees overture — Peekskill, N.Y. — “was chosen … because it is the site of a proposed natural gas pipeline expansion [Algonquin Pipeline, developed by the Spectra Corporation] within 105 feet of a filing nuclear facility,” that being Indian Point Energy Facility.
Whereas Spectra and other corporations have historically benefited from wide-ranging implementation of eminent domain, Rahmani plans to mount a legal defense of Blued Trees using the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Acts (VARA). To again quote Blued Trees manual, Vara grants “authors additional rights in the works, regardless of any subsequent physical ownership of the work itself, or regardless of who holds the copyright to the work.” Thus, the ownership and composition of Blued Trees is especially important in not only an artistic sense, but also a legal one.

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