Concept
The Tree of Cinema is a monumental public installation exploring cinema as a living archive of collective memory — one shaped not only by filmmakers and the images they create, but by the people who experience them.
Inspired by the universal symbolism of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge, the work considers cinema as a space where stories, emotions, and human experience are passed from one generation to another. The project also draws inspiration from Agnès Varda and her deeply human approach to memory, everyday life, and the relationship between cinema and lived experience.
A steel trunk rises into a canopy formed from flowing strips of film. Within them, recognizable moments from cinematic history appear alongside images of ordinary viewers: arriving at the theatre, waiting for popcorn, finding their seats, laughing, crying, reflecting, and leaving a screening carrying something of the experience with them.
The Viewer
By placing the audience directly within the film strip, The Tree of Cinema shifts attention toward a figure often absent from the history of cinema: the viewer.
A film is created by the filmmaker, but it becomes something different each time it is experienced. Every viewer brings their own memories, emotions, history, and associations to what they see. In this sense, the audience does not simply receive a finished work — it continues it.
The installation reflects Alina Tacmelova’s ongoing exploration of memory, participation, and the invisible ways individual experience becomes part of a larger collective narrative.
Collective Experience
Created for TIFF’s Festival Street, the work also considers the movie theatre as a shared social space. At a moment when cinema is increasingly experienced individually and through personal screens, The Tree of Cinema returns attention to the simple but powerful act of strangers gathering in one room to experience the same story together.
Beneath its canopy, cinematic history and ordinary human life become intertwined.
The viewer is no longer outside the image.
The viewer becomes part of cinema’s memory.
Concept Sketch
