The paper, drawing from reflections on convergences of environmental humanities and memory studies, examines commemorative affordances of forests planted as memorials, focusing on their materiality.
Commemorations that engage organic substance refer predominantly to their semiotic aspects, associating the object of remembrance with meanings commonly attributed to nature in its social construction – authenticity, neutrality, peace, tranquillity. Natural objects also serve as symbolical stabilizers through imagined sense of nature's endurance, or as an alternative to violence through symbols of soil, burial, and the blooming life above the ground. Yet limiting organic substance to its cultural connotations is reductionist, especially considering the new materialist and relational approaches visible in environmental humanities. Meanwhile, following the material-semiotic approach to memory studies, memorial's agency manifests itself not only in its primary social role of a narrative medium, or the ability to invoke certain affects, but also in its materiality and the resulting transformations it undergoes as a space/object. In fact mnemonic assemblages should be analysed not as binaries, but as interrelated material-semiotic networks (Huyssen, 2016; Kontopodis, 2009; Ladino, 2019). Especially interesting is indeed the case of memorials "built" with organic substance that act, mature, and transforms in an entirely different manner than a stone-cast monuments. An example to illustrate this is taken from the deeply troubled context of modern Israel. Memorial forests are an intrinsic element of the Jewish-Israeli memory culture, correlated with socio-political meanings of nature in Zionism, as well as erasure of Palestinian material heritage through immense landscape transformations. Since the largest memorial forests were planted in the first years of Israeli statehood (such as the considered case study, the Martyrs Forest), it is possible to explore their material and commemorative state today, seventy years upon creation. Exploring the role of non-human agency in these memorial sites leads to focus on a human-natural co-creation and more-than-human character of commemorations. Moreover, putting them in ecological, not only social time, addresses the age of overabundance and overmonumentalization, typical for the Anthropocene.
