Folding Forests ~ Wednesday, July 15 from 18:00 till 20:00 ~ COOP SUMMIT 2026

Folding Forests invites you to become part of the living forest—a complex, breathing being, continuously engaging in the process of playing and re-enacting. Through a thread of guided acts and looped sounds, the journey unfolds as a tentative procession—from Casa Cava, a chamber carved from limestone, out onto the open plain of the Giardino del Silenzio, part of the Murgia Materana Park.  

The performance draws on collaborative reality-forming, constructing non-linear narratives that resonate with both rituals rooted in the remnants of old-growth forests and play-pretend built upon experiential knowledge. Tended over and through time, forests archive political inflictions and ideologies. Folding Forests seeks to bring memories into movements, to listen to the echoes of erosion and catastrophe, regeneration and abundance.

I suppose this could be a forest. A feral forest, a tender forest, an unrestrained forest, formed by dust, rocks, branches, ants, cows, wind, and heat. As the sun sets on Matera, it alters our perception once again.

Forest
Fo rest
For est
For rest
For rest ing

We softly lean into 
your whispers
as we 

Tend… to rearrange the letters… denT 

We walk walk
A foot writes the path
It rose from under the feel
imagined as leaving a dent
Which dents to leave? 
How are dents left? 
Who is able to leave the dents? 
The forest enters through the soles of the feet
shifting weight
 from stone to gravel, from gravel to sand, from sand to dry grass

ssssrrrrr
shshshhhh

The forest is folded.

With a heartfelt thank you to Pietro Franco, Antonio Bellomo, Giuseppe Grossi, Marco Laterza, and Andrea Bagnato. In respect to our host Matera and all the places this COOP visited together during our one-year research “Tending Forests In Our Minds”: St. Erme (France), Nida (Lithuania), Matera (Italy), and Breda (the Netherlands).

Join COOP study group TENDING FORESTS IN OUR MINDS at Casa Cava & Giardino del Silenzio in Matera for

Folding Forests 

Student participants: Amalie Sveske Ourø, Ella Tegenbos, Emma Caspers, Hannah van der Schaaf, Keit Bonnici, Lío Spinnewijn, Richard Liu, Veronika Marxer, Yindi Chen

Tutor participants: Jurga Daubaraitė, Egija Inzule and Jonas Žukauskas

Folding Forests  is realized through the ongoing friendship, conversation and collaboration between the Dutch Art Institute and:

Neringa Forest Architecture
evolving into an offering on
Wednesday, July 15  from 18:00 till 20:00 (17:30 Aperitivo) at Casa Cava
as part of COOP SUMMIT 2026. 

Read more about the trajectory of COOP study group TENDING FORESTS IN OUR MINDS.