Alexia Achilleos

Alien Forest explores the British colonial forestry policies in Cyprus. The policies were established by the British Colonial Government in Cyprus in 1879, to protect and restore the “destroyed” landscape of the island. However, colonial forestry saw the newly annexed colony’s natural resources with an aim to increase Britain’s prosperity. The colonial administration demarcated state forest areas, attempted to control goat grazing, undertook afforestation and reforestations, but also planted non-native trees, such as eucalyptus trees and acacias, which were brought from Australia, another British colony. The purpose of these alien trees was to sanitise areas from diseases such as malaria, create agricultural land, provide firewood, but also for “aesthetic reasons.”

Alien Forest presents an alternative perspective on colonial forest policies. Forestry reports, written while Cyprus belonged to the British Empire (1878 – 1960), have been used as training data for a GPT-2 natural language processing model, which in turn generated new (often surreal) text based on the text. In addition, the artist visited various sites in Cyprus, where colonial plantations of invasive alien tree species continue to impact native ecosystems, to create a photographic dataset of the landscape. The dataset was fed to a GAN model, which in turn generated new, imaginary forest landscapes.