secondary forest

Giulia Cenci creates elaborate sculptures and installations by fusing industrial elements and organic forms, arranging them into jarring compositions that invite viewers to question human’s relationship with nature. Cenci’s work features animals, plants, and human appendages cast from melted-down scrap metal, reusing found objects, agricultural tools, old machinery, and car parts. These seemingly disparate elements are then hung, suspended, or pierced together like pieces of meat, morphing into a wild habitat void of hierarchy—where a human bone is treated with the same care as the branch of a tree or a wolf’s face.

For the High Line, Cenci presents a new production titled secondary forest. The sculptural installation is composed of animal, human, and plant forms cast from aluminum, sprouting from a steel grid armature. Dismembered wolf heads sit atop bundles of branches that seemingly stand in for their bodies, and cast tree roots hover above the ground, as though they’ve just been pulled and unearthed. Masks of human faces, their eyes squeezed shut, peek between branches. Their visages appear throughout the work, upside down and sideways, as though they’ve been frozen in a tumbling motion. The work also features the limb of a tree girded with metal, seemingly wearing a human face. This amalgamation of organic and industrial materials reflects the history of the Meatpacking District’s meat trade and the High Line’s role in that industry. Cenci also reflects on the blurred line between humans and all other forms of life. The work’s title, a term used in botany to describe a forest or woodland area that has regenerated through largely natural processes after human-caused disturbances, allows viewers to reconsider their own impact on and relationship to the cycle of life.