Buy art Free the Forest
In September 2025, Perhutana participated in the international event SWAB Art Fair in Barcelona, Spain. This presence was made possible through the participation and agenda carried by Jatiwangi art Factory, under the curatorial framework Polar and Tropic.
The theme Polar and Tropic emerged from a reflection on the encounter between two geographical and cultural regions situated at opposite poles—the Nordic region in the Nordic region and Southeast Asia. Differences in climate, landscape, history, and traditions have shaped distinct ways of perceiving nature, the environment, and everyday life practices. Yet despite these differences, both regions are entangled in shared global concerns: climate change, ecological crisis, and the evolving relationship between humans and natural resources.
Within this context, Perhutana presented Forest Liberation Front, an artistic conception that positions the forest not as an object of exploitation, but as a subject with agency and the right to its own continuity. Emerging from lived experiences in tropical regions, where forests function both as spaces of production and sites of conflict, this idea articulates the urgency of reimagining the relationship between humans and ecosystems.
Forest Liberation Front is not intended as a literal organization, but as a collective metaphor, an imaginative front line that brings together humans, vegetation, soil, and ecological memory within a shared spectrum of solidarity. Through this approach, Perhutana invites the public to perceive the forest as a living entity actively engaged in social, political, and economic dynamics.
In the context of the encounter between polar and tropical regions, this proposition becomes a statement that forestry issues are not merely local matters, but part of a broader global discourse. Perhutana’s participation in SWAB Art Fair 2025 thus becomes an articulation of position: that the liberation of the forest is an effort to cultivate shared awareness of sustainability, ecological justice, and a future in which humans and nature remain fundamentally interconnected.
