“TREES NEED A UNION” and other updates
Hello friends!
It has been a while since we sent out an update on our activities, so there is a lot to share. As many of you know, in 2020 we initiated a trilogy of long-term, community-engaged art works that investigate inter-species relationships and biodiversity in woodlands in England, Norway and Germany. 3 WOODS is commissioned by Matchbox (DE), Arctic Arts Festival (NOR) and GIFT (UK).
In late-summer 2021 we participated in a virtual residency in Germany. During this time, we created a workshop, billboard series, community gathering, and continued to expand our network of foresters, ecologists, and residents. Our work last year was very much focused on the Heidewald, a small woodland in Maxdorf. During February and March this year we were in residence in Dilsberg. Finally on-the-ground, we visited over 17 municipalities and met with dozens of experts, authorities, and communities. It was AMAZING! At the end of our residency we had an exhibition and open studio. We will share a little bit about all of the work we created for Germany so far.
(Click the bolded titles to read more on their project page!)
We wanted to experiment with how people could expand who they live with. Too often we think of our neighbours as being other humans who live next to us or in our communities. What would it look like if residents of Maxdorf began to imagine the places where we live as being shared with humans and the more-than-human world? This 90 minute project invited people into the Heidewald to meet someone new: a flower, bird, plant, rock etc. They would spend time with this other being finding ways to understand them through simple explorations that were facilitated by a small handbook. After meeting their neighbour they would then introduce this other being to another human.
The Trees Know Something About You
This series of billboard interventions were located throughout the small village of Maxdorf next to the Heidewald. We invited residents to think about their relationships to other species that lived in the woods. In some instances we proclaimed the trees knew something about them—that the trees are observing our human activities. Another billboard encouraged residents to be more like other species in the Heidewald. To “be more aphid” or “be more fox” implies learning new ways of being in the world.
As part of our residency in 2021 we worked with a videographer to capture hi-resolution images of the Heidewald so that we could study the different species that lived in the woods. We quickly realized there was an opportunity to collaborate with some residents of Maxdorf through this process. So we made a bunch of cardboard masks in our home studio in Calgary, flattened them, and mailed them to Germany for locals to wear as part of the video. At the same time we put out a public call for residents to send us haiku about the Heidewald. These haiku were compiled with conversations we had with people and our own research to form the text in the video. This Planted Place is 75 minutes of footage shown across three different screens. Click the link here to watch an excerpt.
Our exhibition at the Kommandant’s House in Dilsberg included the installation of This Planted Place and an open studio. It was important to us that we share our process and thinking with people within our German network and residents who visited our exhibition. So we had an open studio. It included four framed collages that mirrored actual tree rings that we had photographed of cut trees. To mimic the cutting of the trees, we cut up our research, brochures, and other printed materials we had collected over the last two years. The collages were thematic: tourism, animals, Heidewald, and Odenwald. Alongside the collages was a poster-within-a-poster that included marginalia reflective of our thinking and research. The poster demands: “TREES NEED A UNION” and “HUMANS WILL LIVE THE WORLD OF OUR INTERSPECIES DREAM”. We also offered a small self-directed listening exercise that people could do in the nearby woods.
