Along the 24th Street stretch of Manhattan’s High Line, cast human and wolf heads sprout out of trees made from bones and bare branches that grow from and around a steel skeleton. Some plants languish under the weight of dying flowers, while others splay like the fingers of a skeletal hand reaching out from a buried grave, grabbing at the air.
Italian artist Giulia Cenci’s Secondary Forest (2024) is a new commission that blends the natural and industrial worlds, kicking off a contemplative spring at the High Line. Placing humans, animals and plants on equal footing, the installation is a ghostly installation derived from found industrial objects and cast scrap metal.
The term “secondary forest” refers to the natural regeneration of vegetation in areas once cleared by human intervention, inviting passers-by to the High Line to consider the cycles of life and growth and the impact of unnatural causes on them. Sensi’s use of farm tools, old machinery, and car parts points to the Meatpacking District and the High Line itself as she forcibly dismantles the hierarchies that separate humans and industry from the natural world.
Diana Barboza and Romi Favayedi were friends visiting New York from Los Angeles and Toronto enemy of the people on broadway, tell allergic The sculpture is dramatic, interpreting the human head as a neutral mask.
Barbosa commented that the bones and branches appear to be “genetically spliced together” to make up the trees in Cenci’s sculptures, noting that “it looked like the rest of the people and branches had been devoured by some metallic entity, the only The things that survived were the plants, and I loved them.
“In this particular case, the animals do seem to be doing better than the humans,” Barbosa continued, pointing out the pained expressions on the humans’ faces.
Pointing to two human heads stacked on top of each other, Fawaydi said the two men looked like they had died together. “All they had left was their nervous system.”
“There’s a quality of death – the fact that there are branches, it’s not meant to bloom on the face of despair,” she explains.
Two existing works by Tschabalala Self, as well as new works by Teresa Solar Abboud, Tishan Hsu and Chloe Wise, are expected to join the “secondary forest” along different areas of the park later this spring. Cenci’s commissioned work will be on display at the 24th Street High Line through March 2025.
