Thoughts on forest, attention and reconnection after the project relating forests – written by Marianne Cornil
It was dusk in a Norwegian forest. The group moved slowly along a path, leading further and further in, both into the forest and into the imagination. A poem first stimulated the intellect toward a different perspective. The whispering of the trees, sounds of the underground, poetic words and dancing lights, then underground sounds shifted attention. Each step was a response to the forest; the forest responded in turn.
A masked figure appeared between the trunks, silent and still and looked at us, unfolding the stories of the forest.
One participant said afterwards: “The nature itself was looking at me.“
About the project
Relating forests was a Creative Europe cooperation project (2023–2025) developed by three partners: TheatreFragile (Detmold, Germany), Cultures Éco-Actives (southern French Alps), and NOBA/Vitenparken (near Oslo, Norway). We shared a simple question: how can art help people develop a relationship to forests — not through lectures or infographics, but through experience?
Over one year, the project moved through iterative workshops with sensory and place-based experiments, storytelling, mask exercises, and sound work — with participants of different ages and backgrounds, in different forest landscapes across three countries.
The full scope of what we learned, observed, and created together is documented in the global project report. We invite you to browse through it, just as you might stroll through a forest, and let yourself be guided by whatever piques your curiosity. A documentary video of the laboratory in Germany is also available for those who want to see rather than read what this looked like in practice. Both are worth exploring alongside this article.
An aesthetic of relation
The central artistic intention of relating forests was to create resonance with living nature through artistic experience — engaging body, attention and imagination.
The forest was to be neither scenery, nor theme, nor object of study, but an active partner in creation. This meant working with the forest, not on it. Its sounds, its light at a particular hour, the rhythms of its trees and seasons, an unexpected silence or the song of a bird. These were not interruptions to the work. They were the work. Artists adapted their gestures and the whole proposition to what arose. The artistic form itself emerged from the encounter between the artists and the place — through bodily, sensory, interior experience and by listening to the forest’s own stories.
The non-human beings themselves were invited to contribute to the narrative. Sounds recorded underground were woven into the performance. The proposition was designed tobe situated, fragile and alive — impossible to reproduce identically, because it was genuinely in dialogue with a specific place and moment.
Rather than constructing a fixed narrative, the project worked through an open structure made of fragments — a mosaic that each participant assembled inwardly. The myths provided a framework that left room for emergence, for what the situation itself would bring.
The body as the primary medium of connection
Relating forests distinguished itself by a passage: from looking toward bodily presence, from observation toward sensory involvement.
Walking, touching bark or moss, breathing, listening, singing, wearing a mask, becoming aware of biological similarities — these simple actions shifted perception away from the visual toward direct bodily experience. They made possible a feeling of relational belonging to living nature.
Participants no longer “watched” the forest: they were in it, physically, sensitively, emotionally.
The mask was used as a perceptual tool. According to participants, it blurred the boundaries between self and the forest. It enabled a non-verbal shift in perspective by restricting vision and intensifying attention.
In workshops, participants wearing masks described a vision “wider and more concentrated at the same time,” a sensation of porousness between their body and the surrounding plants and insects, and an easier access to introspection.
The imagination as a space of reconnection
Artists invited participants to share personal stories, memories, and local tales featuring the living world. These were received without hierarchy and transformed artistically in real time. The back-and-forth between individual stories, collective myths, and the forest’s own responses generated a shared imaginative space, anchored in experience.
Multilingualism was a strong artistic choice. The simultaneous use of several languages deactivated immediate understanding, shifted listening toward sound, rhythm and atmosphere, and reflected the very difficulty we have in “understanding” the living world. Accepting not to understand everything becomes a condition for entering into relation. One participant described a strong emotional connection despite not understanding the words, noting that the atmosphere worked without translation.
Relating forests makes no claim to offer a scalable policy instrument. But it does raise a question worth sitting with: at a moment when scientific knowledge about forests, biodiversity, and climate change is more abundant than ever — and is not translating into the transformations we need — what role can embodied, sensory, slow experience play?
What comes next
Relating forests has ended as a funded project, but the questions it opened have not. Several threads are already growing from it.
The production STILL — TheatreFragile’s immersive forest performance developed in direct dialogue with the relating forests process — continues to tour and evolve. It carries forward the core artistic research into how performance in forest environments can shift ecological imagination.
The methodology developed throughout the project — particularly the combination of mask work, slow sensory exercises, participatory myth-making, and structured feedback collection — is now informing work in other contexts, including youth theatre and urban public space. The question of how embodied artistic experience can generate different forms of ecological attention is one we intend to keep working on.
Project resources:
• Global project report (authored by the consortium)
• Documentary video of the laboratory in Germany
Article written by Marianne Cornil, based on the global project report by the consortium.
PC feature image: Linnea Syversen
