LEARNING TO LIVE WITH FOREST (AGAIN)

"Learning to live with forest (again)" is an ongoing personal investigation seeking to extend the notion of home towards the forest. The project started in 2019 when I received the talent development grant of the Creative industries funds. The research is based around many visits to small scale, private forests of friends and family in Austria and the Netherlands. I participate in their forest care-taking routines and rituals in order to better understand what activities create people's bond with the forest.

A guiding principle in this project is the concept of ‘the taskscape’, developed by anthropologist Tim Ingold. The taskscape emphasizes the temporality of landscape by focussing on knowledge born out of the immediate experience of dwelling. It decenters the human experience by placing us within a “total movement of becoming” through interactivity and resonance. As Ingold writes: “our actions do not transform the world, they are part and parcel of the world’s transforming itself”. 

The concept of the taskscape inspired me to see landscapes from a perspective of a multiplicity of routines and rituals. Designing landscapes then becomes a tool for ‘living with’ - a fertile structure for the regenerative enactment of the world through movement, encounter, agency, resonance, embodiment, care. I like to call this ‘topographic living’: a continuous construction of place through reciprocal actions between humans and landscapes.

In 2022 I made a first printed publication that is a collection of fieldnotes gathered since the beginning of the research, working in forests and through books. The booklet contains a photographic essay that shows moments of intense personal encounter and collective work. These moments gave me insight into the ‘topographic living’ of others and into my own making of ‘forest as home’. The inner part of the booklet collects materialized thoughts of scientists and artists, friends, myself and ‘my forest’. Those pages act both as a scattered collection of findings and as non-literal annotations to the photographic essay. The inserted booklet is an incomplete visual index of the tasks I explored in my research with the aim of creating a personal forest taskscape.