The Forest Underneath
Video Installation: 2-Ch. HD Color Silent 19’35”
Short Documentary: HD Color Stereo 11’
Van Eyck Academie
arc en rêve centre d'architecture
IMPAKT Festival
MCBA Musée Cantonal des Beaux‑Arts Lausanne
Architektur FilmTage Zürich
TRANSFER Architecture Video Award (Finalist)
arc en rêve centre d'architecture
IMPAKT Festival
MCBA Musée Cantonal des Beaux‑Arts Lausanne
Architektur FilmTage Zürich
TRANSFER Architecture Video Award (Finalist)
2019
Staged as a 2-channel video installation, or screened as a single-channel documentary, The Forest Underneath combines materials shot on location in and around the Hambach Forest into an observational film. The last remnant of an ecosystem that has occupied the Rhine plain since the end of the last ice age – and a site where corporate exploitation, environmental activism, and environmental degradation coexist – the forest borders the largest open-pit coal mine in Europe, and ghost towns doomed to be torn down. Planned to be cleared to mine by the energy company RWE, the forest has been a political standpoint for environmentalists since 2012, when a diverse group of activists took permanent residence within it, in self-built ‘barrios’ and treehouses, behind barricades, to protect it from planned destruction. The meandering camera captures their environents, surroundings and moments of their everyday.
The Forest Underneath was originally produced as a contribution to a visual investigation of the landscape of the Meuse–Rhine Euroregion, curated by Bas Princen at the Jan van Eyck Academie.
The Forest Underneath was originally produced as a contribution to a visual investigation of the landscape of the Meuse–Rhine Euroregion, curated by Bas Princen at the Jan van Eyck Academie.
