Background
I partly grew up with the forests of the Harz: endless walks, dense spruce trees, lakes and abandoned mines. This landscape shaped my sense of nature—structured, immersive, almost timeless. But over the years, the forest changed. The monocultures collapsed, the trees died, and the once-familiar terrain became unfamiliar. My mother said: “It’s ugly now.”
I started stopping—really looking. In the ruins of what I thought I knew, a new world opened up. This shift in perception—between memory, loss, and new forms of attention—is what I want to carry to Estonia.
Main Object
The project proposes a collective field research in a clearly defined, closed-off outdoor area. A square-shaped zone is marked with tape. Within this space, a group of participants investigates the terrain through bodily presence, observational tools, and altered perception. The goal is not to extract data, but to engage: to touch, to observe, to comment, to listen. To allow the landscape to push back.
Technical Description
Participants are equipped with a toolkit of devices that distort or shift perspective: head-sized magnifying lenses, measuring instruments, endoscopes, contact microphones. The group is encouraged to develop their own methods of exploration—playful, tactile, collaborative. Restrictions may be added: wearing protective suits, limiting one’s sense of sight or hearing, or navigating with unfamiliar optical tools. The project becomes a shared attempt to re-learn how to perceive a place—through slowness, constraint, and heightened attention.
References
Fabian Knecht – Isolation: isolating pieces of landscape to shift perception.
Richard Long – walking as a form of marking and knowing land.
Agnes Meyer-Brandis – poetic tools and field experiments with nature.
Timothy Morton – Dark Ecology and The ecological thought : ecological awareness as strange, relational, entangled.
Aesthetic reference: the underground world of Delicatessen (1991) – makeshift tools, sensory distortion, altered habitat perception.