TREEHU MANA – Research Video


TREEHU MANA is both a research-project and video-work. With practices and technologies of listening it „confrontes ourselves with the silence of nature“ (Christopher Manes). Listening is seen as an experience that has the potential to open ourselves towards the unexpected. It is seen as method that requires exposure and vulnerability and aims to unlearn a language based idea of being interconnected with the environment. TREEHU MANA is an invitation to rehearse awareness that we are speaking while we are listening.

Listening understood as a practice is extended and transferred to the whole body as well as to sensors and technical devices. Through different ways of listening and in self-exposure to trees and a forest, fragile, multi-layered ways of speaking are sought.

Via the voice and its text TREEHU MANA refers to Kurpie, a remnant enclave of primal forest in Poland. In Kurpie singing with the forest transformed into a practice today known as forest singing. People were communing with the forest using the reverb and its soundeffects. Today not only the primal forest in Kurpie is endangered and shrunk to small protected areas. Also the unique (acoustic) relation of humans towards the forest including their songs are vanishing.

TREEHU MANA is following the idea of the human acoustic entanglement and asks: How is our auditory perception affected by our surroundings? What are the qualities of acoustic inter-connectedness? How are the human-inflicted sounds echoing in the non-human world? In times of mass extinction and noise pollution, how can an understanding of the human as an acoustic being shape our relationship within environments?

 

Logo-Senatsverwaltung-Kultur-und-Europa-1
enabled by the research-fund of the Senat Department of Culture and Europe
antneuro_logo_1_0
in cooperation with ant neuro