2025-2026 COOP study group ~ TENDING FORESTS IN OUR MINDS
Tutor team:
Guests:
Partner Institution:
Student participants:
Amalie Ebsen Ouro Jensen, Ella Tegenbos, Emma Caspers, Hannah van der Schaaf, Keit Bonnici, Lío Spinnewijn, Richard Xuanlei Liu, Veronika Marxer, Yindi Chen
Student led reflection:
Chronicles
Program:
Day to Day
TENDING FORESTS IN OUR MINDS
Introduction:
We all have forests in our minds. Forests unexplored, unending. Each of us gets lost in the forest, every night, alone.
Ursula K. Le Guin, introduction to “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” in The Wind’s Twelve Quarters: Short Stories (New York: Harper & Row, 1975)
Paths cut through undergrowth, traces of fire, marks of felling and planting, and the quiet persistence of fungi, moss, and root systems, all register overlapping inscriptions and technologies. This COOP looks at forest environments through their components, threads, and connections, approaching them as assemblages in which economic demands, political and ecological processes are inseparably entangled. Together, this COOP enters the forest as a weave of relations in which human activities and ecological dynamics are inextricably bound.
Forests unfold across spatio-temporal layers as both environments and archives. Soils, waters, and surfaces bear the accumulated marks of extraction: some from reciprocal practices of tending, others from reductive systems of yield and efficiency. Cycles of growth and decay intersect with cycles of commodification, appropriation, and maintenance. Each intervention, whether driven by extractive short-term interests or by practices of sustained cultivation that support species diversity, social knowledge, and collective memory, inscribes itself into a palimpsest of relations.
Attuning senses and slowing perception, this COOP enters the forests as a dense mesh of relations that condition its uses and imaginaries, and examines long-term modes of maintenance and regeneration. With particular emphasis on trajectories of cultivation that advocate for the long-term, this COOP works with artistic practices that have formed in response to forest environments marked by economic and geopolitical interests, yet sustained by urgencies to preserve ecological continuity. The study unfolds through site-responsive work and close reading of historical and contemporary traces of cultivated forest spaces, while also assembling vocabularies from ecological histories, practices of documentation and evidence gathering, and initiatives that advocate for environmental justice.
During the academic year, forests in the proximity of the DAI confluence locations: St. Erme, Nida, and Matera, serve as starting points for approaching forests as environments where labour, memory, governance, extraction, use, access, and regeneration interrelate. Alongside these specific locations, the collaborative study extends to other forest environments, situating local observations within broader political, ecological, and cultural contexts. The modes of working in this COOP combine attentive bodily practices, field observation, sound, mapping, countermapping, and collaborative glossary-making.
The collaborative study process unfolds in cycles of dispersal and confluence. During dispersal, participants carry out individual work that extends the shared experience of the confluence, developing readings, observations, and materials, and relating these to their own practices. Individual perspectives connect with the collaborative process, advancing a form of co-study in which individual practice and the shared trajectory shape one another. During confluences, the COOP comes together by engaging with and visiting specific sites, and through meetings and exchanges with invited guests, sharing amassed materials, tools, and practices. Each confluence concludes with the production of a publication that gathers the materials addressed. Over time, this growing publication becomes a glossary, archive, and script that serves as a base layer to be drawn upon at the Summit.
