Forest Futurities grows out of long-term work listening to and learning from forests and those who defend them throughout the global tropics. Through listening, relational research, and experimental forest media, we cultivate decolonial, resurgent forest futures.
About
Forest Futurities is a collective platform for forest listening, relational research, and experimental forest media. Working from tropical forests marked by colonization, deforestation, war, and extraction, it centers Indigenous epistemologies, non-extractive research, experimental poetics, and listening practices to repair relations with living forests and cultivate decolonized, resurgent forest futures.
Projects
Our work through intertwined projects emerges from forests themselves. In collaboration with forest defenders — Indigenous and local communities, creative practitioners, scientists and scholars — they form a field of experiments in listening, experimental poetics, publishing, and relational 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, creative, and curatorial project that explores how Indigenous cinema and collaborative audiovisual practices become instruments of forest defense in Colombia’s war on forests. It understands forest media not as films about forests, but as media that emerge from ongoing relations with the selva and remain accountable to those relations. 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—contributing to a broader grammar of forest futurities grounded in listening and collective resurgence.
Rastrojo (Press & Revista)
Rastrojo (Press & Revista) is the poetic and forest‑media imprint of Forest Futurities and the collective Paz con la Selva, rooted in rastrojo—forest regrowth after disturbance. Dedicated to forest destruction–resurgence cycles, Indigenous film and poetics, and experimental environmental humanities, Rastrojo convenes poems, books, films, and hybrid works as forest media for resurgent forest futures. Visit Rastrojo Press & Revista → revistarastrojo.com
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.