An Amazonian tree becomes a monumental steel sculpture at Art Basel

At Art Basel 2026, in the section of the Swiss fair dedicated to monumental projects and large-scale installations, a giant renaco tree from the Peruvian Amazon has been reproduced in metal through 3D scanning and suspended above a pixelated surface displaying images of water and vegetation.

Perhaps we have reached a moment when ecology has moved beyond nature. Or at least a moment when nature can also exist in the form of databases, three-dimensional scans, digital images, and metal structures. This possibility has informed the work of Timur Si-Qin for years. The German artist of Mongolian and Chinese heritage explores the points of contact between biological ecosystems and technological infrastructures. Mariposita is the latest expression of that research.

The origins of the project lie thousands of kilometers from the Swiss fair, in the Amazonian region of Ucayali, Peru, where Si-Qin has spent extended periods conducting research in recent years. There, he identified the large renaco tree that he later scanned together with its surrounding environment. Roots, vegetation, waterways and details of the forest floor became the digital foundation from which the installation was built. “It is an incredible paradise on earth, with explosive biodiversity,” he tells Domus. “It is a place where plants, rivers, stones, insects, and light compose themselves into endless masterpieces.” Yet this experience was accompanied by an awareness of the ecosystem’s fragility. “Two years ago, when I was there, the rivers were at the lowest point ever recorded, and forest fires blanketed the region. You could smell the smoke in the air, and while hiking through the forest, small pieces of ashen leaves would descend like snowflakes.”

Timur Si-Qin

It is from this tension between wonder and vulnerability that Mariposita emerged. “The rainforest is not an abstract symbol of nature. It is a living intelligence, a world of beings, relationships, and forms.” he explains. “Through Mariposita, I want to create a threshold into that world, and to remind people that these places are real, fragile, and urgently in need of care.”

If the subject of the installation is the Amazon rainforest, its language is that of 3D scanning, digital modeling, steel and moving images. For Si-Qin, however, there is no real opposition between these tools and the natural world. “I have never really believed in a strict opposition between nature and technology.” he explains. “Technology is often treated as something artificial, as if it exists outside nature, but human beings are organisms, and our tools are part of our extended phenotype. In this sense, a camera, a 3D scanner, or a computer is not categorically separate from a seashell, a termite mound, or a beaver dam.”

Naturally, he acknowledges, many technologies have been used to exploit and destroy ecosystems. “The problem is not technology itself. The problem is the worldview that guides it.” In Mariposita, digital tools are therefore not used to replace nature, but to sustain a relationship with it. The original tree, renamed La Guardiana de Rinquia, continues to grow in the Amazon rainforest, while its digital counterpart travels from one continent to another.  “It allows the work to carry the presence of a living tree without possessing or destroying it.”

The concept around which the project revolves is that of the pristine—a term that could be translated as ecologically intact or uncompromised. It is a problematic word, especially within contemporary environmental discourse, where the idea of untouched nature is often challenged for its romantic and idealized assumptions.

Timur Si-Qin

The artist shares many of these critiques, but believes the debate has produced an unexpected side effect: the idea that truly wild ecosystems no longer exist. “Most people have never been even one hour’s walk from the nearest parking space.” he observes. “But these places still do exist. There are ecosystems where the density, beauty, and intelligence of life are almost overwhelming. There you can find the true masterpieces of nature, the greatest artist of all.”

For Timur Si-Qin, the pristine does not coincide with the absence of human beings, but with the presence of intact ecological relationships. In this sense, the Amazon embedded in Mariposita “is not a fantasy of purity,” but rather “an attempt to make visible the living complexity of a place that is still vibrantly alive, while also acknowledging how vulnerable it has become.” A way of drawing attention to nature and its exploitation that, paradoxically, relies on the very tools we are accustomed to considering its opposite.