wilderness
research


WOODS WON’T VAPORIZE
(2022)

Working with the notion of wilderness touches on several aspects simultaneously: the question of power relations between humans and land, the practice of letting go of control in favor of building collaborations, zooming into biological processes enabling alliances between living and dead matter, and shifting attention from static objects to dynamic fluxes and interdependencies. It became a mixture of dance, cooking and carpentry. Within the process, we collected multiple stories about woods and wilderness focusing on the forest ecosystem as a nexus of interspecies relations and biological processes. We worked with dance scores and storytelling as practices of celebrating energy flows. We focused on glucose as the primary substance that all living beings exchange and wood from the perspective of craftsmanship. The research became a space for reflecting on work organization and collaboration. Making joint decisions allowed us to generate a third quality beyond our individual agendas and capabilities.