Systema / Palais Carli, Marseille 

AN ANTHOLOGY OF UN-X-ACT NATURAL WOOD WORK
Compiled by /Réunis par farO (Ana Baliza and Alexandre Estrela)

28 – 31 August 2025

With contributions by:
Anne Lefebvre, Anatoli Susin, Mário Cesariny, John Matthews, José Maurício, Musa paradisíaca & Tomé Coelho, Hans Peter, Marco Franco, Ellie Ga, Sabine Grimm, João Maria Gusmão, Bernardino Ribeiro, António Manuel Saraiva, Ernesto de Sousa, Juli Susin, Franklin Vilas Boas, Vincent Wolff.

« For as long as people have handled sticks, they’ve been staring at them and saying, « That looks like a camel. No, it’s more like a snake. Or a whale. Very much like a whale. » This guessing game relies on pareidolia—a psychological phenomenon that allows us to see figures and faces in things—and is the foundation of a transhistorical sculptural practice that uncovers wild animals and stick figures in branches, logs, and roots. Once the pastime of shepherds and hunters, it comes naturally to enthusiasts of all ages, hobbyists or experienced artisans, and probably to anyone who has experienced boredom in a forest with no Wi-Fi.
The method of this art form requires a careful observation of the raw material, minimal intervention, or none at all. Sometimes you need only a little faith, as a simple twist of the wood makes its shape shift; sometimes, like Michelangelo, you prune it slightly to remove only what doesn’t already belong to the creature inside. What emerges isn’t carved into the wood but coaxed from it – as if the being was always there, hiding like a ghost in plain sight, a natural ready-made waiting in the tension between the matter and the mind.
Guided by the density and resistance of wood fibres, the sharp blade of the involuntary artist releases a menagerie of beings in the same wooden space. From another angle, a coiled viper doubles as a seahorse, a jaguar transforms into a salamander, a rabbit-duck conundrum lurks in every figure, things perhaps unseen even by carver.
These carved branches confess a deep-learnt survival skill that once helped humans scan for threats camouflaged in the background, like the leopard’s spots dissolving in shadow, a python weaved in bamboo trees, or a platypus emerging from…wherever the platypus emerges from. This ancient art pratice is after all an exercise in recognition, a training in ambiguous perception to keep us sharp for a hide-and-seek game, Nature’s longest-running play.
An anthology of un-X-act natural wood work gathers prime examples of this art form, objects and photographs alike, serving as sculptural mediums for a matter of the mind. With this collection we hope to revive a human skill that helped our species trick its own mind to overcome the fear of an uncertain natural world, and ready our imagination for the digital wildness ahead. »
FarO, Marseille, August 2025.