The woods are inhospitable habitats for humans, they are more suitable for animals that live in humid soils and in the dark. Many of us are scared of the woods, and don’t feel comfortable in such an environment. We mostly live in villages and cities, and our bodies are used to paved roads, perpendicular walls, smooth surfaces without gradients and danger signs. No animals, no tangles, no mud.
Woods are melting pots suited to meet with the huge, uneducated, undefined, wild nature. They are places to perceive the slow duration and an indefinite and unmeasurable space. In order to cross the woods you have to open paths in the freely growing vegetation. There are no streets, no coordinates for orientating. Our perceptions have no hold in experiencing with sloping terrains and dark undergrowth, you can lose your bearings and you have to find another balance.
The experience of the woods can awaken the ancient reminiscence of the environment we came from before civilization, rediscovering a primordial feeling that resounds in the cavities of the bodies as well as the woods. The woods can generate doubts, which can reveal the deception upon which civilization is based. Civil disobedience lives in the “wilderness” of the forests and of the mind.
Woods are always been dangerous, for the humans and for the thoughts. Enter with caution.
From a human point of view, the woods are mostly seen as a resource for our sustenance, places to get food and wood, in line with the extraction approach that have characterized our relationship with the environment. But, from an ecological point of view, forests are places of transpiration and photosynthesis, and they are fundamental for the water cycle and oxygen production. Excellent habitat for biodiversity, they are one of the most important ecological components of Planet Earth. Moreover, a forest constantly regenerates. Forests are ecosystems that survive through the synergy between different life forms, suche as plants, animals, mushrooms, bacteria, in ecological relations of exchange and mutual inclusion. By constantly eating each other!
We cannot speak of sociability, we should invent other terms for other models of coexistence, devised to think about intraspecific interactions, in order to invent other political models, based on new narratives of life and the Earth.
At the time of the Anthropocene, in the context of climate changes and ecological imbalance, I don’t want to talk about queer and postcolonial ecologies, pluriverse ontologies, climate justice, planetary ecocide, or so on. They are all too much human concepts. I want to try to look away from a human one to a most than human point of view. An earthly, ecological one.
PROJECT
The village of Brădet is surrounded by woods of spruce (brad in Romanian) and beech trees, which unfold on the Carpathian mountain range, tracing the old border of the Transylvania region. I have always thought of them as a richness of oxygen and wilderness, and as a marvellous location for art and research.
Intersecţia wants to organize a series of meetings of exploration and conversation in the woods, inviting national and international guests to spend a few days experimenting with new forms of investigation and knowledge sharing, to generate aesthetic practices and thoughts with-in the woods.
The project aims to develop an eco-critical thinking offering the opportunity to research, breath and think outside the urban environment, getting in tune with the woods, experiencing the wilderness, in order to seek new coordinates not only to approach the woods, but to learn from the woods how to deal with the urban. The experience of such an unusual environment, can give a turn to imagination, and the goal is to find a meeting point between the reasons of mankind and the reasons of the forests.
I don’t know, and I don’t want to know, what will be done in the woods, because I want the woods to suggest us what to do, in an adaptive and surprising way. To make thoughts grow according to the rythm of the forest.
To get in touch with the woods, just breathe.