Forest Futurities is a transdisciplinary platform for research, pedagogy, and collaboration in tropical forest worlds marked by war, extraction, and resurgence. It weaves together Indigenous epistemologies, environmental humanities, scientific research, experimental poetics, and listening practices to cultivate resurgent, decolonial forest futures and repair relations with living forests.
Grounded in listening to forests and those who defend them, the institute works with forests as co‑theorists rather than as neutral backdrops. Across tropical forests, it convenes scholars, artists, forest defenders, scientists, and communities to develop grammars of forest futurities that are embodied in relations and oriented toward collective resurgence.
About
Forest Futurities Institute is a transdisciplinary platform for research, pedagogy, and artistic collaboration that begins from living forests. Grounded in listening to and learning from tropical forests marked by colonization, deforestation, war, and extraction, it works in response to the ongoing destruction of forest worlds and the communities who defend them.
The institute centers Indigenous epistemologies and non‑extractive research in the environmental humanities, environmental sciences, experimental poetics, and listening practices to repair relations with living forests and cultivate resurgent, decolonial forest futures. Working throughout the global tropics, Forest Futurities collaborates with forest defenders—Indigenous and local communities, creative practitioners, and scholars—to reclaim forest languages, repair ruptured relations, and orient collective responses toward decolonized co‑futures with forests.
Projects
The institute’s work unfolds through intertwined programs that emerge from forest territories rather than describing them from a distance. Together, they form a field of experiments in listening, film, publishing, and collaborative research on forest futurities.
Listening to Forests Lab
Paz con la Selva
Forest Media
Paz con la Selva is a collective and field‑based program grounded in Indigenous epistemologies and non‑extractive research, working in response to the ongoing colonization and ecocidal destruction of forests in Colombia. It combines creative practice and field research, tending curatorial and collaborative projects with forests, Indigenous communities, and forest defenders to decolonize our gaze of the “forest” and to repair and reclaim relations and languages that foster the conditions for resurgence and our collective futures. Through collaborative research, pedagogical labs, film and listening projects, and community‑driven conservation work and publications, Paz con la Selva works from forest territories together with those who defend living forests.
Forest Media is a research and curatorial project that explores how Indigenous cinema and collaborative audiovisual practices become instruments of forest defense in Colombia’s war on forests. Grounded in long‑term relationships with Indigenous film collectives, it understands “forest media” not as films about forests, but as media that emerge from ongoing relations with the selva and remain accountable to them. Through screenings, talks, and writing, the project traces how forests participate as co‑creators in image and sound, how Indigenous filmmakers reclaim cameras and editing tools historically used for colonial documentation, and how these practices repair relations, revitalize endangered languages, and foster intergenerational transmission of forest epistemologies.
Rastrojo (Press & Revista)
Rastrojo is the publishing arm of Forest Futurities Institute, comprising both a small press and a revista dedicated to forest destruction–resurgence cycles, Indigenous film and poetics, and experimental environmental humanities. Rastrojo Press publishes books, chapbooks, and collective anthologies that emerge from the institute’s collaborations, bridging creative nonfiction, poetry, visual scores, and forest‑based research. Rastrojo Revista is a hybrid journal‑magazine that curates essays, poetry, film stills, interviews, and experimental work on forest futures, grounded in Indigenous and decolonial perspectives.
Re(in)surgent Forests
Listening to Forests Lab is a practice‑based lab on listening, sound, and communication in forest territories marked by colonization, deforestation, and war. It begins from embodied listening in the forest—entering through decay and decomposition, the thresholds of death nourishing life, and the dense entanglements of relations and languages that compose living forests. Through workshops, field‑based labs, and university courses, the Lab develops methods of listening with forests and those who defend them, opening onto grammars of forest futurities that orient responses toward resurgence and collective futures with living forests.
Re(in)surgent Forests is a curatorial and writing platform developed in response to the ecocidal destruction of forests and the targeting of Indigenous defenders. Grounded in learning from and listening to forests and those who defend them, it traces forests as living relations and living languages, attentive to the thresholds where death nourishes life and to the loss of those generative relations. Through workshops, dialogues, and the development of films, installations, and literary works for forest futurities, Re(in)surgent Forests works to repair and reclaim the relations and languages of lost forest futures and to articulate grammars of forest futurities oriented toward resurgence and co‑resistance.