Voices from the Forest is a forest performance, a collective experience/sensory ritual, prepared in the process of collecting experiences of living and collaborating with a unique ecosystem - the Białowieża Forest. Based on collective, as well as individual experiences of the people creating the action, and collected data (accounts of people; oral messages, archival materials, literature, mythology - studies/legends, research in biological sciences, anthropology, archaeology and historiography of the area), as well as embodied knowledge - the kind that comes directly from body memory, subconsciousness, intuition, genetic algorithms, i.e., from the bodies of our ancestors - we are creating an incantation/vocalization that aims to map/recover, and ultimately reconnect, the torn by various, repeated disturbances, the tissues of the emotional, spiritual and physical organism of the Forest. We seek the knowledge and technology to heal the wounds directly within it, whose extraordinary capacity for regeneration comes from the ultimately unbroken continuity of the ecosystem, the resources of biodiversity, the cyclical nature of birth and death. We invoke the voices of beings that have appeared and disappeared over the centuries in the forest; trees, animals, plants, people. In the polyphony of human cultures, as among cultures of bacteria, fungi and entire ecosystems, the basis for survival, but also for flowering/fruiting and successful growth, is collaboration; cooperation based on adaptation, exchange of resources, skills and living space.

Trees don't remove scars - they overgrow them with new, healthy tissue, but if you cut the trunk, you can accurately read the history of all traumas and disorders on it. It is a kind of memory map. We will try to tell this story by letting in as well as letting voices through the collective forest body.

Created in collaboration with Kultura Kresu and performed by Agnieszka Bułacik, Ewa Brokos, Julia Legeżyńska, Dorota Michalak, Ola Zielińska