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Trailer Forest Tales and Emerald Fictions 2019
3 channel HD, colour, sound, 16:9, 20′
CREDITS:
Concept and Script: Monica Ursina Jäger
Camera: Monica Ursina Jäger / Michael Zogg
Video Editing: Myrien Barth
Animation: Anja Sidler
Composition and Sound: Michael Bucher
Narrator: Phil Hayes
Interview: Jennie Ching
Text: Monica Ursina Jäger / Damian Christinger
Text editing: Aoife Rosenmeyer
The three-channel video installation “Forest Tales and Emerald Fictions” 2019 is based on several months of artistic research in Singapore. A narrator - he calls himself Revenant - leads the viewer from the dense skylines of a metropolis deep into the networks of the primeval forest and back into a hybrid world of urban and natural structures. As a « Returner « he has experienced many conditions, times and places, and recounts the forest from the multi-perspective of an anthropologist, biologist and poet.
These narrations are interwoven with stories of a Singapore- Chinese woman recalling past times, her childhood memories of specific places and animistic parallel worlds. The complex image-text collage combines images from urban and natural spaces, painting and animation and continuously alludes to various forms of co-existence, collaboration and co-habitation of human and non-human entities.
Forest Tales and Emerald Fictions 2019 approaches the forest as a spatially complex structure, as a place of multi-layered contexts and inter-dependencies, as well as a place of imagination, narration and memory. Centuries of colonization have shaped natural habitats: from imperialist territorial claims to scientific systematization and taxonomic classification practices. The installation however shows the forest not only as a resource, infrastructure and service provider, but also as an ecosystem of transtemporal and translocal character. The forest is shown as an inherently ambivalent setting of matter and knowledge, as a rationalized environment, but also as a place of irrational stories. The installation ultimately poses the question of to what extent the forest can serve as a model for sustainable urban development in the future.
