Ursula Biemann is an artist, video essayist, and writer. Her research-oriented practice is based on extensive fieldwork in remote landscapes, from icy Greenlandic waters to Amazonian rainforests, where she investigates the geopolitics of climate change and the human impact on natural ecologies, questioning the role of modern science in decolonial knowledge production. Biemann’s artistic training began in Mexico City. She then studied at New York’s School of Visual Arts and later at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s prestigious Independent Study Program. She was awarded the Swiss Grand Award for Art / Prix Meret Oppenheim in 2009. Biemann’s intellectual and incisive video essays intricately interweave cinematic vistas with documentary footage, science fiction speculations, and academic scholarship, forming rich tapestries of knowledge in which the boundaries of epistemological realities are tested, stretched, and expanded.

Filmed in Piamonte in southern Colombia, one home of the Inga people, Biemann’s video Forest Mind (2021) builds on a previous work, Forest Law (2014), and blends together the alchemical and biochemical, the scientific and shamanic. It opens with a mesmerizing visualization: the digital code of rainforest sound recordings, a still image, and a biopsy of a seed from the endangered forest are transcoded into an eternal DNA sequence. Interspersed with performances by and interviews with the artist’s longtime Indigenous collaborators, the video becomes a medium through which audiences encounter the mind-altering plant (and teacher) ayahuasca; they come to know—as opposed to simply learn—the cosmological depth and breadth of ancient wisdom. Here, advances of modern science, including in plant neurobiology, quantum biology, ethnobotany, and the anthropology of science itself, are brought into a common paradigm with decentralized vegetal intelligences and cellular states of consciousness familiar to traditional medics of the Amazonian rainforests.

Forest Mind was created in the wider context of Devenir Universidad, a long-term, Inga-led artistic and research collaboration from 2018, whose goal is to establish an Indigenous institute of higher learning in the community. Devenir Universidad, whose name means “becoming university,” marks a shift in Biemann’s critical practice to embrace alternative forms of cultural and pedagogical co-production of knowledge, while buttressing her commitment to using artistic action to positively impact lived realities and engage in crucial reparative exchanges.