Ambush #5: Pep Vidal

The intervention by artist, physicist, and mathematician Pep Vidal takes as its starting point the life of the large, fifty-year-old pine tree which was located in the Eina Bosc courtyard until its felling, forced by safety concerns during the renovation works. The intervention proposes the recovery and reconstruction of the tree's life cycle based on meteorological research conducted with the support of professionals from two collaborating entities: Alfons Puertas, from Observatori Fabra de Collserola, who provided irradiance data for the last twenty years of the tree's life; and Miguel Larrañeta, from the Universidad de Sevilla, who provided the technology that allows for the algorithmic calculation—based on meteorological information from the city of Barcelona—of the tree's irradiance during its first thirty years. Using this information, and with the aid of a lamp installed on-site and remotely monitored by the artist, the installation emits the number of lumens per day equivalent to the light that the tree received during each day of its life, drawing its energy from a solar panel covering the base of the felled trunk. Weather conditions interfere with the amount of light that the lamp is able to emit daily, thus establishing a link with the current irradiance of the place, and revisiting a past life and its symbolic reanimation through current climatic contingencies.