Pierre Huyghe A Forest of Lines, 2008

A forest suddenly materializes in the Sydney Opera House. The exhibition runs for the duration of one Earth rotation. People enter wearing headlamps and get lost in this forest composed of a thousand trees and mist. It takes over the whole space, the seating, the aisles, the stage, and balconies. It is a place of diversion, a point of departure. Following the structure of the Aboriginal songlines, where songs provide a mythical and geographical description of a path, enabling orientation in the desert, the words of a song provides an oral map to shift from the place of representation toward the source of the image.

Landing in Australia, James Cook entered one of the oldest forests on Earth, where the Aboriginal leave their dead in the hollows of the strangler trees, and wrote: "Here trees swallow whole men."

Leave the Opera House behind
Follow the harbour and the piers
Walk to the metal bridge
Cross the bay
Cross over the Luna park
Follow the shore
Pass the tropic and the fake Ayers Rock
Take One and A One
Until you arrive where Jimmy Cook stands
Walk the lane bearing his name
Don't wander in the forest
Cross the field of sugar cane
Make a detour by the sea
Cross the river
Pass the Waterhole, pass Copper creek
Turn left to the Wilderness Trail
Walk through the forest
To the bottom of Thornton Peak
Here trees swallow whole men
Ask Prudence how it all began.