Letters to a forest (2024)
runtime 23.19.
This work has been a long time in the making, and explores the contentious topic of forests and forestry in Sweden. I grew up in rural Värmland, a region where forestry has long been integral to livelihoods. Like many of our neighbours, my family own small patches of forests that have been managed or felled, then replanted or regrown, over the past decades. In my relationship to forests; play, upbringing, privilege, belonging, ecology, and politics have competed and complemented each other. Although I visit often, I have lived in urban centres across the world where I have engaged in climate justice work since I graduated high school. The research underpinning this film has been guided by my relationships with people and landscapes I’ve gotten to know both before and after I moved from Värmland, many which I have since long been distanced from.
Sweden is home to the European Union’s last intact forest landscape but also hosts regions with very high forest management intensity. In many places, large areas of monoculture plantations are patched with biodiversity rich bosks. In the last decade, forests have become more political than ever. Some claim reserves are dwindling, and your ecosystems are exhausted, others argue we have more trees than ever. None of them are necessarily wrong. It seems we were witnessing a standoff between those who want to protect biodiversity and indigenous rights and those who value the right to private property and believe a high level of timber extraction from monoculture plantations is needed for a successful “green transition”. Making work about forests in a time of mass extinction means that I do so in order to get us to better see the forests and us as part of them, but I also attempt to highlight how many small scale farmers have always depended on the forest for their economic survival. The inability to manage or fell a forest could be catastrophic at family level. The conflict is at once global and intensely local.
The film and it's research is contingent on previous work by queer ecologists, multi-species ethnographers and indigenous thinkers who have paved the way and inspired me academically. In May and July 2024, I travelled through parts of Sweden and Sápmi and met with, filmed, and interviewed eighteen people. They come from diverse backgrounds and have a wide range of relationships to the forest. They are my ethnographic interlocutors of this film, that I see as a burgeoning multisite ethnography where I attempt to map out a complex web of interconnections in a landscape fractured by both political debate and resource extraction.
Throughout the research and editing of this film, I have wanted to make a case for correspondence as an ethnographic method by which to approach interconnectedness and forest/human relationships. I create with an aim to take difference seriously, engaging with perspectives other than my own. Inspired by anthropologist Tim Ingold, who urges us to take up a relationship with the world based on correspondence, by aim is “not to describe the world, or to represent it, but to open up our perception to what is going on there so that we, in turn, can respond to it” (Ingold 2013, 7). As Ingold claims, “(o)nly when we appreciate things as their stories can we begin to correspond with them” (2021, 7). This suggests acknowledging the value of lived experience – much in the tradition of Feminist, Queer and Black studies emphasising situated knowledge. But it also puts emphasis on writing ‘in real time’ and creating for someone to receive what you have produced, patiently inviting them to get back to you. Maintaining a sense of immediacy and allowing unfinished thoughts or open questions to remain part of the work.
The film takes the form of an essay, or a collective letter, and continues the exploration of correspondence explained above. Informed by for example Minh-ha, Berger and Azouley, I see photography as a site of encounter, where the self’s and the subject’s agency are simultaneously at play. Using a hi-8 tape video camera to do part of my recordings therefore felt specifically suitable. Its grainy fleeting quality and embodiment of my hand motions make the viewer aware that the footage is not objective, but rather an expression of a point of view. I find it easier to approach both people and places with a camera in my hand. The camera allows me to linger, re-do, and ask about things I would otherwise not feel I had the authority to be curious about. It also requires me to build a relationship with the person I am filming, ensuring that they feel comfortable and trust me to represent them fairly. The meetings were fleeting interactions where we collaboratively learned about and with the landscape.
The process of thereafter putting together the film becomes a form of assemblage, where footage is digitalised, reconstructed into a timeline, and ‘translated’ for an audience. Involving both sound, visuals and linguistic representations felt particularly fitting when representing the forest and those within it. Language simply does not capture all that it is. To represent the multiple layers, I used layovers of semi-transparent footage and patched soundscapes to symbolise the inability to grasp and take in it all at once. Understanding my practice as one located between documentary and fiction, I do not claim authenticity but rather attempt to show a multiplicity in collage. Filmmaking – as well as letter writing - allows for a dual movement where we both let the world come to us and reach out to show the world something. This I hope is reflected in the form as well.
The film was made as my final project for the MA in Visual Anthropology at Goldsmiths University of London. It is also the first more substantial short film that I have directed filmed and produced by myself. The project continues and is currently supported by Region Värmland and Doc Out West, Filmcloud.
Thank you to;
Arturo Maciel Flesha; Assistant DOP
SALT, Sofia Melander; Original Score
Simon Torssell Lerin; Electrical activity from plants recorded in the forests of Värmland transformed into sound through modular synthesis. Polytrichum Commune, Artemisia Absinthium, Trifolium Pratense.
Micke Swärd, Dutzu Vlasi Konstantine, Ulfstrand Wennström, Karolina Eywa Carlsson, Stig-Olof Holm, Agnes Åstot, Marie Karlsson, Kamilla Sol, Kim Hultgren, Erik Svenson, Sven Wadman, Karin Perers, Pêl Rostam, Lennart & Tore Lennartsson, Su-Ping Burman; for your generous participation in my research and film