The Forest Echoes Back - Receiving and Transmitting Forest Conversations Through an Ecology of Listening

‘Wie man in den Wald hinein ruft, so schallt es heraus’ (‘That which is shouted into the forest, the forest echoes back’), is a German proverb that suggests the way you treat someone will determine the form of their reaction. 

With a focus on the Thuringian Forest in eastern Germany, the project sets out to investigate how sound art research and practices can play a role in spreading understanding of biotopes struggling with the challenges of climate change. The Thuringian Forest is an ancient grown forest, estimated to be 10.000 years old. In the last two centuries of heightened industrialisation, much of the ancient forest has been replanted with a monoculture of fast-growing, straight, spruce trees. This monoculture forest has struggled to adapt to hotter and dryer climatic conditions, with the weakened trees being devastated by infestations of bark beetles (Ips typographus). The research project tunes into the reverberative effects of these ongoing processes of change. It listens to contemporary scientific understandings of forests as interrelated communication networks of trees, plants, and fungi, and seeks to implement artistic methods of translation and broadcast as a means of calling attention to forest networks in crisis. Practices of critical listening and field recording are developed as methods of interaction with various forest actors that include human hunters and foresters, bark beetles, ancient and monoculture trees, birds, buck and fungi. With a focus on the sonic, the works that will emerge from these interactions are audio essays, physical audio releases, streaming of environmental radio, written explorations and discursive radio formats.