Debarking - Ecosomatic Performative Action
Raffaele Rufo, 2025 | Video, 3 m 55 s
Presented at El Cuerpo de Gaia Exhibition — 25 March 2026
Universidad Complutense de Madrid & Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

Venue
Exhibition Hall, Hospital de San Carlos – Rey Juan Carlos University
Calle Capitán Angosto Gómez Castrillón, 91
Aranjuez (Madrid, Spain)

Organised by
GAIA Research Group: Sculpture Between Body and Territory
Faculty of Fine Arts – Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Curated by
Valerie de la Dehesa

Part of
III Gaia International Congress: Sculpture, Body and Territory

Description
Debarking is an ecosomatic performative action for ensemble, presented in video form, emerging from the mass death of pine forests in Rome. Filmed in the Pineta dell’Acqua Rossa, where thousands of trees stand dead yet upright like silent witnesses, the work unfolds as a ritual of embodied listening and mourning. Through improvisation and somatic attunement, performers enter a shared sensory field with the trees, giving voice to a more-than-human grief. The act of debarking—removing the bark to reveal the transforming organic matter beneath—renders death visible while exposing its continuity with life, opening an ethical tension between care and violence. In this gesture, human bodies assume responsibility for a death they are entangled in, seeking to mend the fractured relation between humans and trees, and approaching mourning as a passage within the cycle of life–death–life, in resonance with the critical condition of forests across Europe.

Credits
Concept, direction, and production: Raffaele Rufo (PhD)
Performers: Helen Spackman, Valentina Vitolo, Chiara Marchesani, Tommaso Collalti
Location: Pineta dell’Acqua Rossa, Natural Reserve of the Roman Coast, Ostia (Rome, Italy)