In a Strange Place (GIFT Festival)

​In a Strange Place is a meditative 9-channel video installation and social engagement project that delves into the future of our forests and those who care for them.

Born out of a multi-year, international research and engagement process with communities, In a Strange Place features 150 foresters, ecologists, activists, conservationists and land keepers from England, Germany, Norway, and Canada performing abstract, slow-motion gestures in the woods. These improvised choreographies are reflections of the participant’s care work, their connection to their local forest, and their role in an uncertain multi-species future.

The aim of In a Strange Place is to translate the complex knowledge and expertise of forest caretakers into emotional and visual gestures for a non-science audience. Showing forest work as an embodied practice, each video—a type of slow portraiture—captures the forest workers waist up and wearing handmade masks of imagined future forest creatures.