#tree of hell

IT LOWKEY KINDA MAKES SENSE IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT

1. HE LIVES OFF A FLUID FROM HUMANS

2. The turtle neck kinda gives me those vibes

3. another thing that’s reminding me of vampires, SHARP TEETH

Another year of battle with the Tree of Hell

The correct weeding implement to remove a finger-sized “Tree of Heaven” sapling is a shovel.

I thought I’d learned that lesson two summers ago, when I foolishly bragged here that I hadn’t seen any new ailanthus altissima seedlings poking above my lawn. But by this June, I had a new crop of these trash-tree growths invading the front yard and part of the side yard.

This time around, I dug deeper,…

GREEN HELL IS THE NEW HEAVEN: Timisoara in the Anthropocene (Stefan Tiron and Mihai Salajean, 2012, ***English Subtitles Included***)

genre: eco-shockumentary

ruining time: 29 minutes

We are proud to present this re-mastered version & with a brand new soundtrack (courtesy of selfmademusic.ro).

This shocku- wildlife video is a follow-up on a post-invasive hyperdensity guided tour trough Chisinau I started with Vadim Tsiganash in 2010, tracking an invasive species spread trough the capital of Moldavian Republic (*amply documented on ghettopalm). The Geen Hell is the New Heaven was filmed under extreme climatic conditions in one of the most torrid summers on record. This made it the almost perfect - future NOW investigation.  Two weeks into the merciless sun, slightly hallucinating from the heat stroke, dehydration and a lot of ‘asphalt yoga’, we followed trough shiny corporate parking lots & under old railway bridges some of the extremophile denizens including TOH; tree of heaven of our teratophytic dreams & vivid prophecies.

Coincidentally A. altisima is one of the most bitter plants containing ailanthone - a quassinoid - which are some of the most bitter substances in nature (50times more bitter than quinine). Wormwood in its ancient biblical reference signifies bittnernes לענה (la’anah) which also means “curse" in Arabic and Hebrew(or Chernobyl in Ukrainian). This ambiguous and ambivalent (mostly malevolent) bio-conspiracy involves a pretty smelly escaped Chinese ornamental (臭椿; pinyin: chòuchūn; literally: “foul smelling tree” in Chinese), innocuous for most people and rogue organism for bio-conservationists (as most branded invasive/alien species) is for us truly a prophetic & eschatologic plant, almost like the wormwood in the Bible. Aillanthus altissima has been seeded into the mythic future-present of our speculative fictions, and possibly into most Mega-Cities of Tomorrow after it has cunningly seduced botanical hunters via proxy of biocapitalist profit dreams, exotic lust and high pollution tolerance. In our final gesture - we potted the TOH saplings, trying to invite them back into unwilling ‘culture’, a process that is always masked, camouflged, giving it away for free(from post offices to life insurance companies and cultural capital HQ) - and advertising it as perfect office plant.

The whole docu starts with a nod to 2000AD comics  and to a future naturalist from MegaCity One modelled on Sir David Attenborough…