“What differentiates life from the inanimate physical world is that life-forms represent the world in some way or another, and these representations are intrinsic to their being. What we share with nonhuman living creatures, then, is not our embodiment, as certain strains of phenomenological approaches would hold, but the fact that we all live with and through signs. We all use signs as ”canes“ that represent parts of the world to us in some way or another. In doing so, signs make us what we are.”
— Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human (2013)
I often wonder: are we always understanding the world in a human-centered way?
Does this perspective limit our perception of reality?
Perhaps the world we know is only one version among countless possibilities.
If all living beings perceive the world through signs and symbols,
can we say that nature itself contains an internal system of signals—
a network of communication that connects all things, beyond language?
I imagine how forests grow silently, how they expand, entangle, and erode—
not to oppose humanity, but to reshape the world through a quiet form of coexistence.
They form a new ecological network, one that includes trees, oceans, skies, animals—
even traces of human presence.
With this in mind, I began to conceptualize a series of jewelry pieces where nature takes the lead.
These are not traditional ornaments, but symbolic devices:
they mimic the logic of the forest, adopting forms of growth, entwinement, and spread,
as a response to the possibility of thinking beyond the human.
Here, design is imagined as an interface—
a point of contact between human and nature,
a tool to extend perception, to carry signals,
and to remind us that the body is not a boundary, but a part of a living system.
If we begin to sense the world in non-human ways,
what new forms can we create?
How does a forest think—and can we learn to listen?
“Eating also brings people in intimate relation to the many other kinds of nonhuman beings that make the forest their home.”
“That jaguars represent the world does not mean that they necessarily do so as we do. And this too changes our understanding of the human. In that realm beyond the human, processes, such as representation, that we once thought we understood so well, that once seemed so familiar, suddenly begin to appear strange.”