A Forest of Many Worlds

Opening on Saturday, 9th October 2021, 6 pm (with certificate and ID) Wood is needed to heat the exhibition – Please bring a piece of firewood.

How do we inhabit the forest? We walked in the forest. Under the sun, a storm, and rain, we walked. On soil, mud, and trails, we walked. By river, streams, and puddles, we walked. With plants, animals, and insects, we walked (consciously or unconsciously). We walked for months in the Sihlwald, a forest between the Sihl river and the Albis hills, which for centuries was called the city forest, der Zürcher Stadtwald. The histories of the Sihl Forest are a complex entanglement of human and nonhuman cycles, materialities, and agencies. As we walked in the forest, we touched, played, and narrated with the multiplicity of beings; we enacted multiple relations, perspectives, and temporalities. We walked (with) the forest into being, into question:

Which forests carry our languages? Where does the city come from? Which histories does death tell us? What knowledges are embedded in the forest? Is there a wilderness? How are forest beings interconnected? How does the forest animate the river? What does the materiality of water evoke in me? What pleasures do we find in the forest? How can we ground our sensibility? What does our body become in the forest?

A Forest of Many World is an attempt to answer such questions – not completely, mostly fragmented. At the same time, the exhibition would change and transform during the following four weeks to recognize the fluidity of our relation to the forest. We do not propose to solve these questions but to encourage potential and speculative sensibilities, readings, and connections in more-than-human worlds.