Lack of Forest: Art, Memory and Ontological Reworlding in the Damaged Land

Lack of Forest is a land-based artistic and research project situated in the post-hurricane landscape of Bory Tucholskie, Poland. In a region marked by ecological devastation and historical trauma, the project intervenes in the land through community-engaged practices and the creation of a commemorative land art installation known as the Mound—a structure made from uprooted trees and roots. The Mound serves as an autonomous meeting place that helps to reestablish and enact telluric connections while confronting and challenging both local and planetary perspectives.

Through observation and participation in processes of decay and overgrowth, Lack of Forest becomes a world-making practice that explores how communities navigate loss, precarity, and transformation. The project engages with the liminal presence of a forest that both exists and is absent, raising ontological questions of being, belonging, and care. It seeks new cosmogonies and relational systems within post-war, post-Soviet, Eastern European cultural contexts, drawing parallels between ecological regeneration and collective healing in the face of intergenerational and environmental trauma.

At the end of my presentation (eco-monument) I quote fragment of Essay by Agata Konczal, from the introduction of The Lack of Forest book.

Panel: Re-enchanting Wounded Worlds: Fermentation, Decay, and Interspecies Grief in Post-Violated Landscapes

Experimental Format, Thursday 11th September, 14.30 – 16.00, HG E 33.1

Convenors: Monika Gabriela Dorniak

This experimental panel, featuring a joint 60-minute lecture performance, brings together artistic research projects that focus on human-decentred approaches to memory studies and indigenous cosmologies. It explores how landscapes — fractured by catastrophe, nuclear testing, extraction, and war — can be re-enchanted through the generative powers of decay, sound, poetry, breathing, fermentation, and interspecies dialogue. Traversing Amazonian and West-German fermentation practices, Andean necropolises, post-hurricane Polish forests, a nuclear testing site in Kazakhstan, and the very air we nurture, we ask: how do more-than-human agencies and world-making practices help us sustain lives and lands marked by loss?

These threads converge in an experimental lecture performance that interweaves molecular presence, olfactory landscapes, and interspecies grief. Through scent, sound, and touch, the lecture performance unsettles anthropocentric notions of agency and memory, inviting participants to experience the enduring echoes of environmental trauma and the possibilities for collective healing.

Together, these projects propose that holding fractured worlds together requires us to listen to the generative murmurs of decay, fermentation, material witnesses, and more-than-human kin — re-enchanting our relationships with landscapes, histories, and futures in the face of uncertainty. The session will begin with a 60-minute multimedia lecture performance, collaboratively created by the participating researchers, followed by a moderated Q&A with the presenters, offering insights into the individual works and perspectives of each artistic researcher.