Synopsis

A human figure finds themself thrown into the heart of a spruce plantation ravaged by a parasite. Through her body, she moves across the different ages of the place, folding into the slow cycle of decay and renewal.

Project Statement

The starting point of this project is the forest surrounding Camila’s family home in the region Bergisches Land in western Germany. She grew up with this forest: crossing it, and being crossed by it, countless times. She’s familiar with the spruce monocultures interspersed among the mixed forest- hiding away the sun and cooling the air, a particular smell. These trees grow quickly and their wood can be harvested for profit just as quickly. Weakened by droughts and heatwaves, however, over the last years the spruces have become easy prey for a deadly parasite, the bark beetle. They began to die, their wood was taken away, leaving open wounds in the forest. Vegetation has been returning only slowly, with nettles, brambles, heathers, and other pioneer plants. One of these such open wounds, slowly healing, is the subject, the environment, and the inspiration of this project.

To poetically investigate the site, we began with a formal and narrative thread rooted in the repetition of movements, through which the performer detaches from an individual, psychological relationship to time. This method, nourished both by our intimate emotional ties to the wood and by prior documentary research, gradually opened a more intuitive relationship with the landscape. From there, shifting the human perspective became essential: we seek to provoke in viewers a particular state of attention – a kind of inner drift that invites them to sense the multiplicity of temporalities embedded in the place. Through a language interweaving images, sounds, and movements, we attempted to reach the forest’s infra-worlds and liminal spaces, where the memory of wounds and healings subtly emerges.