The Walking Trees | Alejandro Chaskielberg Photographer

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THE WALKING TREES

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The Walking Trees

Puglia has the oldest olive trees in Europe. Some are more than three thousand years old — planted before any modern nation existed, before the Mediterranean had the name it carries today. These are trees that watched empires pass.

In 2017, curator Arianna Rinaldo invited me to undertake the artist residency at PhEST — the International Festival of Photography and Art in Monopoli. For ten days I walked through those forests of millennial olive trees looking for the most singular ones. I was not looking for them as landscape. I was looking for them as subjects.

What I found was extraordinary. In the trunks twisted by centuries of wind and weight, I began to see figures: human faces emerging from the bark, bodies in movement trapped in the wood, beings that seemed to walk or dance or cry from within. The tree as portrait. The tree as character. The tree as a mirror of the human.

I photographed them at night, with my long-exposure and artificial light technique. The torches revealed in the darkness what daylight conceals: the almost animal texture of those trunks, the forms that time had sculpted in the living wood. The images were exhibited as giant prints at the Porto Vecchio of Monopoli during the festival — trees several meters tall facing the Adriatic Sea.

In 2025, for the tenth anniversary of PhEST, The Walking Trees was included in the retrospective exhibition of the most significant residencies in the festival's history, published in a dedicated catalogue.

— Alejandro.