collaborating

Supported by the mobility grant Culture Moves Europe, Ida and Jaron conducted initial research for the project Scars of the Woods (2024–ongoing).
Whereas one of them was raised and socialised in a small village in the Palatinate Forest, the largest contiguous forest area in Germany, the other grew up in Ghent, a city in Flanders, a region with one of the lowest proportions of wooded landscape in Europe. Their conversations around forests as human-inhabited and utilised landscapes have therefore sedimented somewhere in the foundation of their relationship.

Spending time with this forest brought them towards a deeper sensibility for its constant pain. As a result of the contemporary effects of a century-long crafting of the forest as a landscape to be exploited, it is today a weakened patient, suffering from heat, drought, storms, and extensive bark beetle infestation. The forest has become what its inhabitants wanted it to be through decades of monocultural forestation, economically motivated private ownership, and radical environmental interventions such as soil liming. For the forest and ourselves, we therefore wonder: how can we stimulate imaginations of future scenarios for this forest that are no longer bound to private ownership and the residues of economic extraction, but instead oriented towards giving back together?

These visible deadly wounds on the inner bark of the locally, monoculturally planted pine trees prove that the European spruce bark beetle (Ips typographus) has used trees weakened by recent climatic conditions as breeding centres.
Often, these bark beetle populations can wipe out entire monocultural sites of pine trees, leaving behind a field of dead wood: thin pine sticks bobbing in weak breezes of hot summer standstill. This is the moment in which the trees are reduced to their economic capacity as firewood, extracted from the rest of their life cycle. But for us, this moment of perceptual standstill allows us to pause and navigate through worlding and storytelling somewhere other than in a sawmill or on a forest owner’s bank account.

From here, we want to cultivate a “common imaginary landscape,” which we understand, with Max Haiven and Alex Khasnabish, not as a steady state but as an active process (2014). To initiate this process, we communicate a speculative proposal of what we want this black hole to become: a breeding ground for mycelium, fostering mushroom growth and kickstarting the fertile composting process of the dead wood, slowly giving it back to its surroundings and continuing its life cycle. Haiven and Khasnabish highlight that an imaginary landscape is not identically inhabited by its members, but rather that “it ‘sparks’ from the friction between individuals, groups, ideas, strategies, and tactics” (2014). We continue to propose our imagination to different groups of people, locally and trans-locally, to foster alternative imaginaries and explore these frictions.

The conversations we have lead us towards other actors and scenarios of the past, to which we want to revisit in order to imagine different possible futures.