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The Forest Encounters Podcast series

The Forest Encounters Podcast is a ten-episode series that narrates human and non-human experiences with the forest through audio storytelling. Drawing on the ethos of nature writing as conceptualized by anthropologist Anna Tsing, the series seeks to engage listeners with poetic, affective, and reflective narratives. Six authors were selected during an open call, and each of the selected texts was recorded and mixed into a single podcast episode. In addition to these six episodes, the series includes four episodes from It Rains Differently, an original script written by Dušica Dražić, Tanja Šljivar, and Mirjana Dragosavljević.

Together, the ten episodes weave a complex and pluralistic audio tapestry of forest experience. The Forest Encounters Podcast amplifies individual voices while asking collective questions about grief and care, transformation and protest, memory and imagination. The diversity of form and voice across the episodes reflects the project’s commitment to openness, experimentation, and transdisciplinary dialogue.

Read about the authors, contributions, and listen the podcast series:

Episode 1 – Notes from an Arborist: Lost Stories, Zoe Jo Rae

Voice: Željko Maksimović

Notes from an Arborist invites listeners into the visceral, physical world of urban tree work. Jo Rae, an arborist and designer-maker, presents a raw, textured account of life up in the trees – literally suspended between city noise and forest presence. With its sharp, sensory language, the piece explores the uneasy tension between safety regulations, urban planning, and the organic unpredictability of trees. It draws on Jo Rae’s everyday entanglement with living trees and the material traces left behind when they are cut down.

Zoe Jo Rae (she/they) is an arborist and designer–maker who currently lives and works in Oslo, Norway. They create objects that tell stories, sparking dialogue and action around cultural and environmental challenges. Working with city trees – both as living organisms and as material resources – creates unique interactions with the concept of the forest in the urban environment.

Episode 2 – Moss on a Coral, Katharina Flich

Voice: Vladislava Đorđević

This lyrical episode, which bridges scientific curiosity with poetic reflection, is set during a fossil hunt with a paleontologist. Flich brings together moss and coral – symbols of slow time, resilience, and fragility – to create a layered meditation on presence and absence. Fossils become stand-ins for unheard voices and forgotten timelines. The forest becomes a site of uncovering and connection, where personal and evolutionary histories are entwined. The piece questions what it means to “find” something – especially when that something was never lost, just unacknowledged.

Katharina Flich is a freelance artist from Austria. She studied biology and evolutionary anthropology at the University of Vienna. After receiving a regional fine art prize in 2021, she transformed her passion for painting and writing into a profession. She is intrigued by the sometimes surreal poetry of reality that is made visible only through the lens of science.
www.flich.co

Episode 3 – ON INFORESTING: Story of Ultima Becoming Woods, Titta Cosetta Raccagni

Voice: Milutin Dapčević

ON INFORESTING presents the deeply personal and emotionally rich narrative of Ultima, a beloved dog, who wanders into the forest to die – or to transform. Using poetic storytelling, Raccagni traces grief and metamorphosis, observing how the forest absorbs and reshapes human emotion and memory. The dense biodiversity of the woods becomes a living character, hosting the return of Ultima in new forms. This is a story of surrender: to wildness, to loss, and to cycles beyond human comprehension. Raccagni’s storytelling blurs the lines between elegy and myth, science and sentiment.

Titta C. Raccagni is a researcher of arts and life from Italy where s/he lives and works. S/he studied and graduated in history of cinema at University and filmmaking at the Cinema Academy of Milan. S/he has worked and experimented with video in the following genres: documentaries, short movies, live performances, and visual arts. She has worked with many different clients, associations, teams, and artists.

https://www.ticora.it/, ultimabaret.org

Episode 4 – Honeymoon, Alex Schuurbiers

Voice: Vladislava Đorđević

This surreal and sensory episode plunges the listener into a feverish dreamscape of insects, myth, and erotic unease. Set on a tropical island, Schuurbiers’ narrative tracks a protagonist who slowly dissolves into the forest, is consumed by it, and ultimately reshaped by its energies. The piece draws on trance and transformation, exploring the breakdown of self in the face of ecological immersion. Marble statues, bug storms, and ritualistic dinners float through the story like hallucinations. This is not a love story, but a story of longing – for erasure, for union, for something primordial and irrecoverable.

Alex Schuurbiers, an audiovisual artist based in Belgium, works predominantly with analogue media. Her work focuses on the subconscious and remembrance, incorporating themes such as Heimat, intergenerational transmission, trauma, rage, and resilience. She often uses trance-like, cyclical, non-hierarchical narrative structures to convey these themes. She is also a founding member of Ursula, a collective of women located in Antwerp that works with moving images. Her films include Handwerk (2021), En Vagues (2022), Where I Lay My Head to Rest (2023), Song of Homecoming (2024), and Placeholder (2025).

www.alexschuurbiers.com

Episode 5 – Green Transition, Felicita Medved

Voice: Milutin Dapčević

Green Transition presents a powerful poetic response to the opaque politics of green energy development in Slovenia, this episode confronts the contradictions between ecological rhetoric and extractive practices. Medved’s voice emerges as both witness and advocate, articulating the fears of forests as they are transformed into infrastructure. The poem evokes the forest as a speaking subject under threat, revealing the violence hidden beneath the smooth language of transition. Stark, urgent, and deeply grounded in place, this piece asks: who benefits from the so-called green future, and who gets sacrificed?

Felicita Medved is a human geographer from Slovenia with an interest in the history of geographic thought. Recently, she has focused on European energy and climate policy. She also writes poetry and short stories.

Episode 6 – A Forest in a Tree, Lea Hartmeyer

Voice: Željko Maksimović

A Forest in a Tree explores the paradox of urban forestry: how can a single tree in a pot mirror the complexity of a forest? Hartmeyer draws from her landscape architecture research, using the metaphor of care to examine trees as relational beings – not solitary symbols but nodes in a living web. The episode moves from scientific observation to philosophical reflection, revealing the hidden networks that support even the most isolated trees. From this perspective, cities can actually host forests – not by density or scale, but by care, attention, and reciprocity.

Lea Hartmeyer is a researcher and landscape designer who is currently pursuing a PhD in landscape architecture at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. Drawing on place-based action research, she explores the urban forest as an infrastructure of care. She became interested in care-based landscape architectural research while working on her master’s thesis for which she received the Archiprix NL and the Fritz Schumacher Young Talent Award.

Episodes 7–10 – It Rains Differently, written by Dušica Dražić, Tanja Šljivar, Mirjana Dragosavljević

Voices: Vladislava Đorđević, Željko Maksimović, Milutin Dapčević, Paul Murray

Spanning four episodes, It Rains Differently offers a richly layered, multilingual performance piece exploring voice, agency, and the politics of speaking as the forest. This original script combines poetic text, narrative fiction, and philosophical inquiry, and challenges anthropocentric habits of language and knowledge. The character of the Forest is imagined as both speaker and subject – sometimes female, sometimes collective, sometimes absent. Through shifting voices and narrative fragments, the work constructs a speculative Forest Parliament in which identity and authority are continually negotiated. The piece is both a satire of institutional language and a sincere attempt to reimagine communication with the more-than-human.

It Rains Differently is a long-term artistic research led by Dušica Dražić. The multifaceted project centers on the reforestation of the Pešter Plateau in Serbia where the forest was replanted between 1978 and 1988. In August 2024, the collective reforestation was reenacted with the participation of volunteers and local community members, and the complete process was filmed. The script It Rains Differently, available here in a podcast format, is part of this multimedia work.

The podcast series is also available on Bandcamp.