The goal of the Forest Encounters Symposium (1 December 2023, Ljubljana) was to develop a multifaceted and interdisciplinary understanding of the diverse values, meanings, challenges, and perspectives related to the forest. Bringing together the disciplines of art, forestry, and the humanities, the symposium approached the forest as a site where ecology and interconnectedness can be explored, and also as a site of diverse and often conflictual policies as well as social, cultural, and economic practices.
Teo Hrvoje Oršanič: A Challenging Future for Forests and Forestry
Teo Hrvoje Oršanič works in forestry and nature conservation. He has served as the director of the Institute of the Republic of Slovenia for Nature Conservation since 2018. In his lecture, he focused on current and future challenges in forestry. According to Oršanič, the EU’s 2030 Biodiversity Strategy and Forest Strategy as well as historically established principles of sustainable, close-to-nature, and multipurpose forest management in Slovenia provide a necessary framework for addressing these challenges. Nevertheless, certain forest species and habitats have an unfavourable conservation status. Therefore, additional actions are required, and a number of important forest management questions must still be answered.
Maja Simoneti: The Forest as a Common Good and the Challenges of Its Management
Maja Simoneti is a landscape architect, spatial planner, and researcher currently employed at the Institute for Spatial Policies (IpoP) in Ljubljana. In her lecture, she focused on the future of the protection and development of urban forests and trees as our cities confront the effects of climate change. Simoneti stressed that contemporary urban forest management challenges must be tackled with complex and broad-based methods that connect different disciplines and also include the interested public. According to Simoneti, these methods can be inspired by good practices from the past: the traditions of Slovenian forestry – known for sustainable forest management – and organized nature conservation, which is closely linked to the activities of nature lovers.
Borbála Soós: Rewilding as an Emergent Subject in Artistic Practices
Borbála Soós is a London-based curator and an active advocate, participant, and organizer of artistic and ecological research. In her lecture, she presented a group exhibition entitled Ecologies of the Ghost Landscape: The Word for World is Forest, which she curated in 2020 for tranzit.sk in Bratislava. The exhibition foregrounded the idea of rewilding as a necessary ecosystem management strategy with the potential to give voice to the unwanted and erased, the subjugated and oppressed, the indigenous and endemic, the human and non-human.
Agata A. Konczal: Forests for an (Un)certain Future
Agata A. Konczal is a researcher working in environmental anthropology, political ecology, environmental history, and forest anthropology. Her presentation draws on stories of forest disturbances – so-called natural disasters – and conflicts related to different visions of forest management. According to Konczal, the study of these phenomena should not be separated from reflections on the dynamics of modern society. They are exemplifications of specific worldviews and constitute a platform for social conflicts, where polarization and binary opposition-based language dividing reality into nature and culture, natural and manufactured, … no longer fulfil their dialogical function. Forest disaster narratives and conflicts related to forests are situated somewhere between the “old world” and alternative visions of the future.
Ana Kučan: Forest as a Cultural Landscape – Silent Potentiality
Ana Kučan is a landscape architect and professor at the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana. Her lecture introduced the forest as a complex element of cultural landscape and an important factor in cultural identity and focused on the semiotics of the spatial perception of the forest. According to Kučan, the assumptions upon which the western relation to the forest lie, and which in part emerge from the structural characteristics of the forest (namely, pathlessness, not easy to survey, dark and unfathomable), are filled with contradictions that determine our current relation to the forest in light of contemporary ecological and social problematics.
Giovanni Aloi: Remembrance and Recovery – On the Fragility and Persistence of Nature
Giovanni Aloi, is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. In his presentation, he focused on how artistic engagement with the forest has changed over time: from Dante’s Divine Comedy which, according to Aloi, became the most influential cultural conception of the forest in the West (as a place of loss and of the human-versus-nature dichotomy), to recent artworks that foreground interconnectedness and recovery: for example, Sildewalk Forests created by Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña in the 1980s.
Read more about the speakers
GIOVANNI ALOI, PhD, is an author, educator, and curator specializing in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Currently Aloi is lecturing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is the editor-in-chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture. He is also the author of many books, including: Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Vegetal Emergence in Contemporary Art (2019), Posthumanism in Art and Science (2020), and Estado Vegetal (2023). Aloi has contributed to BBC radio programs, worked at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Tate Galleries in London, and has curated exhibitions in the US and Europe. He currently is US correspondent for Esse Magazine and is co-editor of the University of Minnesota Press series Art after Nature. https://www.aloi.info/
AGATA A. KONCZAL has a PhD in social and cultural anthropology (2017). She specializes in environmental anthropology, political ecology, environmental history, and forest anthropology in particular. In her research, she explores how the social worlds of people are connected to the natural landscapes of forests. She grew up in the Tuchola Forest in northern Poland. She has been working since May 2022 at Wageningen University in the Forest and Nature Conservation Policy Group. Between 2017 and 2022, she worked for the European Forest Institute where she led the European Forest Governance and Society Team. In 2014, she was a visiting scholar at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and in 2015 and 2016 at Aarhus University. Konczal is currently developing the Forest Anthropology Network with Dr. Jodie Asselin from the University of Lethbridge.
ANA KUČAN is a landscape architect and professor at the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana where she teaches landscape design and theory. She received her master’s degree in urban design in 1992 at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, and her PhD at the University of Ljubljana in 1996. Her dissertation entitled Krajina kot nacionalni simbol [Landscape as National Symbol] was published in 1998. She is the director of Studio AKKA, a landscape architecture and urban design studio. She has designed a number of award-winning and internationally renowned projects, and has lectured at institutions in Europe and the US. She was the leading team member of the project All Shades of Green exhibited at the Slovenian Pavilion at the 12th Architectural Biennale in Venice in 2010. Kučan also works as an editor and author. She wrote columns for the Slovenian daily newspaper Dnevnik (2015–21) and was a member of the Landscape Architecture Europe editorial team.
TEO HRVOJE ORŠANIČ completed his bachelor’s degree in forestry and his master’s degree in natural science in the field of nature conservation at the Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana. After working in business for ten years, he moved into the public sector. He was employed first at the Slovenia Forest Service, and then became the director of Kozjansko Regional Park. Since 2018, he has served as the director of the Institute of the Republic of Slovenia for Nature Conservation.
Even as a student, Oršanič was actively interested in the relation of society to nature. In his opinion, the essence of nature conservation lies in connection and cooperation, because many fields overlap in nature conservation: economics, tourism, agriculture, education, culture, and social services. He emphasizes that the most important part of nature conservation is working with people. Oršanič is also a passionate nature and landscape photographer whose work has been shown in both local and international exhibitions.
MAJA SIMONETI, PhD, is a landscape architect, spatial planner, and researcher currently employed at the Institute for Spatial Policies (IPoP) in Ljubljana. Her primary fields of interest are planning and managing green and public spaces, collaboration with the public in spatial planning, and creating connections between spatial and urban planning, active mobility, public health, and responses to climate change. Simoneti is an advocate of public interests in spatial planning, a member and former president of the Slovenian Association of Landscape Architects, and an honorary member of the Chamber of Architecture and Spatial Planning of Slovenia which awarded her the Platinum Pencil Award for her life work in 2022. Simoneti has authored and co-authored many planning studies, conceptual proposals, competitive tenders, scientific and popular articles, and publications such as Mestne zelene površine [City Green Spaces], Mestno drevje [City Trees], and Pot, največja načrtovana zelena javna površina [Path of Remembrance and Comrades: The Biggest Planned Green Public Space].
BORBÁLA SOÓS (b. Budapest) is a London-based curator and an active advocate, participant, and organizer of artistic and ecological research. Her practice engages with environmental thinking and related social, political, and decolonial necessities. She received her master’s degree in curating contemporary art in 2012 at the Royal College of Art, London, and in film studies and art history in 2009 at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. She is currently the appointed curator at the Stanley Picker Gallery in London. Soós worked at Eastside Projects in Birmingham (2022–23), conducted an ACE DYCP funded research on rewilding and decolonial curatorial practice, and was a Research Associate at CCA in Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland (both 2020–22). She was also the director and curator at Tenderpixel in London (2012–19). As an independent curator, Soós has collaborated with institutions such as the Camden Arts Centre and ICA in London, the OFF-Biennale in Budapest, and the Kunsthalle in Bratislava. Since 2015, she has been regularly invited to be a visiting lecturer by universities including Edinburgh College of Art, the Goldsmiths College, the Royal College of Art, and the Central Saint Martins in London. http://borbalasoos.co.uk/
The symposium (more about here) was conceived and organized by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory in collaboration with Mateja Kurir and Polonca Lovšin, and with the support of the International Centre of Graphic Arts (MGLC Švicarija).
Co-funded by: European Union, Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia, and Ministry of Public Administration of the Republic of Slovenia.