Forest Mind
Multichannel video installation, 2021
Video still from Forest Mind, courtesy of the artists.
Located in the Amazonian forests of Colombia, Forest Mind unites diverse strands of knowledge on the metaphysics of plants, on plant-human relationships, and the coding of life with its form of storing information. From the profound intelligence of plants to the sentient consciousness of the territory, the film entwines diverse research strands. Rooted in both scientific and shamanic perspectives, Forest Mind champions an eco-centric worldview, bridging the realms of empirical knowledge and ancient wisdom. With modern science adopting a predominantly mechanistic take on the living world, and indigenous peoples experiencing an animate natural territory imbued with a mind-spirit energy, these distinct cosmologies were considered vastly incompatible for the longest time. In this poetic video, Biemann adopts multiple perspectives of world-building through film, and explores new scientific methodologies that allow the fusion and conversion of digital and biological elements into a single DNA strand.
Ursula Biemann is a Swiss artist and author, whose practice centers on fieldwork, often in Indigenous territories, and the creation of networks between different fields of knowledge. Her artistic practice reflects on the political ecologies of forests, oil and water. Biemann recently had solo exhibitions at MUAC in Mexico City and MQ Freiraum in Vienna. She published the online monograph “Becoming Earth” on ten years of her ecological video works and the book Forest Mind with Spector Books (2022).