Due to climate change and century-long monoculture plantings, European forests are in despair. Trees are dying, and the ecology is changing at a rapid speed, which also affects the acoustic environment – the forests are turning more and more silent. In A Forest Lament, the sonic sphere of the Thuringian Forest in Germany, a dying monoculture plantation, will be re-created with so-called hunting calls or game-calling instruments that imitate different animal calls. Game-calling instruments have a millennia-old tradition in various cultures of luring animals closer to the respective hunter’s hideout spot and are considered to be the first instruments built by humans.
We will listen to a vulnerable version – one we want to believe in but which is not real – of mimetic whistles that sound out stories about power relations in human-more-than-human interactions, false European forest imaginations and ecological grief.
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Nele Möller (she/her) is a Brussels-based artist working primarily in sound, performance and writing. Her research-based practice focuses on forest conversations, historical nature inscriptions, critical field recording and listening practices. Currently, she is working towards a PhD in the Arts at KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts Brussels. Her research project ‘The Forest Echoes Back‘ is embedded in the artistic research cluster ‘deep histories fragile memories‘ and oscillates around the Thuringian Forest in Germany, which is severely impacted by climate change and an adherent bark beetle infestation.