Forêt à Emporter
A proposal for Concentrico Festival competitionConcentrico festival in collaboration with la Forêt Monumentale festival in Rouen, initiated an open competition for a temporary public installation in the city. The instllation had to discuss the theme of forest as it was the representative for the installation festival happening in the nearby woods.
This was the proposal’s posters and text, handed by Ar. Kerem Halbrecht and myself.
This was the proposal’s posters and text, handed by Ar. Kerem Halbrecht and myself.
Forests in popular imagination are places of mystery and beauty. In reality, forests are also sites of production and protection. We invite visitors to go beyond the apparent contradiction between the natural and the artificial and to have an active role in the production from the forest as well as the production of the forest.
Take away to give back
The public is encouraged to adopt a companion tree and to create a personal traveling forest. The pavilions of the installation will be covered with detachable tiles made of flexible plywood that could be easily folded into cones for sprouting trees.
The action of slowly disassembling the pavilions, and reassembling their parts as containers for seedlings reflects our reliance on trees as a resource and of our power to protect and care for them. Each individual can take a cone home to nurse the seedling. Potentially, In the next edition of La Forêt Monumentale, proud parents of trees could plant their seedlings in designated areas. Through this process, the project effectively creates a public nursery for trees spread around the city.
During the month of the exhibition, we imagine conducting workshops and activations for making the cones, explaining sprouting, nursing, and practices of forestry. This program could become an invitation to visit the other sites of La Forêt Monumentale. At the end of the operation, the remaining naked plywood skeleton would be disassembled and re-used.
Because plywood
Since plywood was introduced to the project as a core material, we investigated its manufacture and were charmed by the grace and flexibility of the peeling process. The relative simplicity and magic of this process inspired us to imagine a reversal: where plywood returns to its existence as a tree. The slow disintegration of the pavilions and its remaking into containers mirrors natural processes of growth and decay while generating a dynamic performance on the street.
The conical spiral shape of both the pavilions and of the seedling containers refer to the flexibility of sheet wood, to the natural shape of the strobilus and to the geometrical abstraction of trees in the forestry industry.
The goal of this project is to nurture new relationships between humans, trees and forests. It is an invitation to revisit the perceptions, functions, and agency we imagine surrounding the making, nursing and use of forests as environments, trees as living organisms and of humanity as part of nature.