A geneticist at a university in northern Florida unhooks a padlock and opens the door to a greenhouse, revealing thousands of loblolly pine trees. Industrial grow lights hanging from rafters illuminate orderly rows of seedlings in beakers, spindly trunks rising from plastic tubs. The plants appear unremarkable, less like the subjects of an experiment than the offerings at a big-box store’s gardening section. But the setting—the trappings of a laboratory, the measurement devices and log sheets—marks the plants as different, as deserving scrutiny and protection. They aren’t meant to prettify an oversized yard or shelter squirrels. They’re vessels for information, designed to reveal something over time—as needles grow from the branches, as bark sheathes the trunks, as resin ducts fill with oleoresin. They’re symbols of a world in which all life is both under threat and subject to enhancement (or even salvation) through engineering.

The modified pines—as actual organisms and as fodder for fiction—are components of a multifaceted work in progress by the artist duo Goldin+Senneby. The geneticist has dramatically increased the production of resin, which includes oleoresin, a toxic chemical that defends against predators and pathogens; he has, essentially, overdriven the plants’ immune systems. When the bark of an older pine is pierced, beads of sap trickle down the trunk like tears. The story of the trees is being told by the writer Katie Kitamura, in a novel that follows an investor who wants to exploit them as an alternative source of fuel, a boon for the clean-energy sector. The investor, who suffers from an unspecified autoimmune disorder, visits the greenhouse to convince the geneticist; he offers her a tree to take home.

For the Crying Pine Tree event, Kitamura read a draft prologue to the novel in a setting devised by Goldin+Senneby.

Presented at:”Crying Pine Tree”, Triple Canopy, New York, January 30, 2020 https://canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/crying-pine-tree