Design process
The design process was inspired by the name of the park "Tiradentes". a figure of Brazilian resilience. We asked ourselves how to be resilient in the city and how we can create a connection between the city and the so nearby Costa Rican forests.

To be resilient, you have to attack from several angles. This is how we decided to create Bosque vivo : a biological antenna between the different green points of the city, full of native plant species. It is not only a point that connects biological corridors, but also a point of rest and reflection for those who pass through the city.

200 animals made of recycled plastic are hidden among the plants. These silhouettes represent threatened and endangered animal species and cry out with faint glows at night. Their purpose is to invite us to reflect on how close nature is to the city (even if we don't see it) and how important it is for us to be close to it.

MEMORIAL (CURATOR'S TEXT)

The human species presents itself as a way of life that seems to organize the extinction of other species as well as its own. The social, economic, political and ecological system that it has adopted for centuries, and that part of humanity insists on maintaining, is one that reproduces a series of injustices and unequally distributes the impact of this system on the environment. Such is the gravity of the situation that it can be said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to think of other possible worlds. This statement makes sense now that, for the first time in history, the human species as a whole can be considered a geological force, since it has the capacity to significantly and lastingly alter the conditions of the planet.

Despite the modern ambition to name, order, classify, and furthermore control and dominate all that surrounds it in the natural world, it is estimated that barely 1.3 million species are known out of the entire biodiversity of the planet, which is thought to be as many as 8.7 million species. That means that, in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, largely caused by human action in this epoch called the Anthropocene, there may well be animals, plants, fungi... and life forms in general, that will disappear before we even know they existed.

The city, in its eagerness to mark a separation with what it considers non-human or nature, has served as a device to systematically invisibilize and reduce the biodiversity of multiple ecosystems. But at the same time it has protected, for aesthetic enjoyment, portions of “artificialized” nature, commonly selected and ordered -that is, designed- in the form of parks, squares and gardens, leaving the forest on the margins: at the city limits. Urbanization, growing on a planetary scale, is one of the human processes that puts great pressures on these limits, progressively destroying the habitat and ecosystems of thousands of species, and the tropical forest is one of those where the most accelerated loss of biodiversity is taking place. Public space, which is nothing more than the city itself, is scarce in San José, and it is difficult to imagine even a forest in the middle of the city, especially one where public life coexists with the biodiversity of Costa Rica's tropical forest. Therefore, the Witnesses of the forest, figures that now inhabit the Tiradentes Park, appear in the midst of native plants that provide biodiversity and enhance biological connectivity. These witnesses, which are also all species threatened by human action on the planet, are also a testimony of what is present in the forests that is absent in the city, but they are above all demonstrators, and hopefully not memories, of the times of crisis that we live in, but that could change.

Alejandro Alcazar - curator-