Artistic Research
Art can work cross-disciplinary and create new imaginaries and new knowledge; with its capacity for critical thinking and addressing diverse publics, it can step up and “play a central transformative role” (T. J. Demos, Decolonising Nature, 2016) in engaging around the importance of nature and forests specifically for our shared and sustainable future.
Due to its environmental and socio-cultural importance, the forest can thus work as a unifying common ground for cross-disciplinary collaboration among artists, curators, researchers, forest specialists, and the general public. Forest Encounters focuses on the broader (post-anthropocentric) discourse of art, ecology, and the rights to nature to envision a better future.
Forest Encounters uses artistic research methods to foster a new art- and culture-based discourse on forest and sustainability. The project takes the crucial transformative role of art and applies it to promote the importance of forests in the fight against climate change. The project will produce: 3 artistic research projects, which include multimedia installation/exhibition at the Slovenian Forestry Institute in Ljubljana (Year 1), art intervention in public space in Graz (Year 2), and film installation in collaboration with the Institute of Forestry Belgrade premiered in the Final Exhibition at the Out of Sight (OOS) gallery (Year 3); 1 Final Exhibition at OOS in Antwerp presenting newly produced 3 artistic research projects and other artworks related to the forest (Year 3), which a public panel will accompany; 6 Podcasts – a transnational collection of stories of different encounters with forest.
The three artist-researchers will work independently on their artistic proposals coming together online through a platform of research and different research meetings; the documentation of the different projects will be published at the end of the project within this web page and as part of the future downloadable material. The artists’ researchers will keep up-dates on their advances within this area.