people: Gerd Aurell

The Geopolitics of the Forest working group meets regularly to share their research on the geopolitics of the forest across art, architecture, political science and landscape ecology. The group are exploring how to develop holistic and interdisciplinary understandings of the human / forest relationship that can represent multiple, overlapping and conflicting interests. They aim to develop a shared critical space for new collaborative artistic research projects which deal with the ethical complexities of forestry in relation to the climate crisis, to reconsider the language and aesthetics of sustainability.

The meetings investigate multidisciplinary approaches to the human and nonhuman entanglements of the forest in Northern Sweden. Research questions investigate the ethical aesthetics of different kinds of woodlands and their material and geopolitical networks.

The Geopolitics of the Forest Working Group is chaired by Luis Berrios-Negron, UmArts Research Fellow in Art and Architecture. Members include: Gerd Aurell, artist; James B. Brown, architect; Sofia Johansson, curator; Toms Kokins, architect; Lars Östlund, forest historian; Edith Marie Pasquier, artist; Janina Priebe, political science; Moa Sandström, Sámi studies; Per Sandström, landscape ecologist, and many others who come to share their research, practices and ideas.

Thinking about the forest as an archive, artist Gerd Aurell investigates the relationship between people and the forest in northern Sweden. The Small Visionary Project research started by examining the evidence of historical and contemporary arenas of conflict over the use of northern forests and how they can be interpreted and visualized artistically. The old-growth northern forest can be read as an archive where layer is written on layer and traces in living and dead trees bear witness of unique events, both recent and far back in time. In deep collaboration with scientists in forest history and ecology, Aurell has investigated places in the forest charged with human presence to produce a new short film with Micael Norberg, Tankar i Hatten / Thoughts in the Hat, and a performative drawing Forest Portal, 2023, executed in the UmArts Studio.

Tankar i Hatten / Thoughts in the Hat was shortlisted for the Umeå Film Festival Storporven Prize 2023, and will be screened as part of the Eight Degrees Contemporary Art on the Forest exhibition at Bildmuseet 15 March 2024 – 12 January 2025.

The film circles around the relationship between a man and the northern forest. We meet Magnus Sjögren, archeologist, musician and activist who walks with us on winding gravel roads and tells us a love story from the past. When Magnus was in his twenties he was searching for a place to stay and he was told about an empty cabin outside Vuollerim. He drives there full of anticipation but when he arrives the curtain moves and someone peeks out. ‘Thoughts in the Hat’ is a film about love, between two human beings, but also between a man and the forest. In Magnus´search for the rare northern orchid Nornan, these two tracks intertwine.

Supported by an UmArts Small Visionary Project Award.

Nominated for the Umeå Film Festival Storspoven Prize 2023.

Directors: Gerd Aurell and Micael Norberg

Producer: Gerd Aurell

Camera: Micael Norberg

Editing: Micael Norberg

Sound: Daniel Westman

Music: Magnus Sjögren and Norrlåtar

The Matsutake Reading Group took place during 2021 inspired by Anna L. Tsing’s multispecies feminist perspective, reading the world through the matsutake mushroom (Tsing, 2015).

Rethinking the concepts and aesthetics of sustainability from new perspectives, the reading group aims to develop a critical dialogue between theory and practice, where both have equal agency, to find ways of empowering a social production of knowledge.

This key text integrates different modes of geopolitical research enquiry with sensory and performative interludes. Inspired by Tsing’s approach to the forest, the group gathers online and at specific locations to read texts, images, objects and spaces, sharing creative practices and ideas through reading, walking, and foraging.

The first sessions are led by Nella Aarne to collectively read Anna L. Tsing’s book The Mushroom at the End of the World: The possibility of life in capitalist ruins, 2015, Princeton.

As an open-ended practice of collaborative learning, reading groups open radically democratic spaces, within which ideas and practices can evolve and transform in (and due to) the presence of others. Intellectual and creative life is fundamentally social – research and creative practices never develop in isolation but, rather, in relation to others and at the intersections of different knowledges, perspectives and experiences. Whilst providing a generative context for these processes, reading groups also make them explicit. Facilitating multiple voices, reading group discussions unfold like patchworks of collective-making-sense without a sovereign leader who would alone hold the authority of interpretation. They resist the vertical dynamics of a master and an apprentice, and relieve the urge for territorial autonomy in individualist scholarly endeavours. Instead, reading groups establish and sustain lateral connections across disciplinary boundaries, and build intellectual camaraderie over unfinished thoughts.  

Nella Aarne, October 2021.