Re(in)surgent Forests

In Colombia, the rates of deforestation continue to rise together with the loss of lives of Indigenous defenders. Re(in)surgent Forests is a response to the ongoing colonization and destruction of forests and the Indigenous communities who defend them. These communities describe the forest in terms of its relationality. Forests form living entanglements of diverse life-worlds decomposing each other and the forest itself through relations of death nourishing life. For these communities, their defense of the forest is grounded in relationality. Re(in)surgent Forests explores what we can learn from forests and the communities who defend them, and how this notion of relationality can orient our responses to their destruction towards resurgence and the generation of forest futurities.  

Forest futurities depend on the reparation and reclamation of Indigenous communities’ relations with forests – relations ruptured through the ongoing colonization and war on forests. Resurgence is contingent on those relations, connecting the past to future generations — and in co-resistance. Co-resistance involves confronting ongoing forms of colonization that consign forests to the continuous colonial past. Central to this is decolonizing the forest itself.  The notion of the "forest" is not necessarily coterminous with tree cover. “Forests” were and remain instrumental to ongoing colonization. Implicated in colonial conquest, the loss of Indigenous life-worlds and languages that constitute forests, Cold War counterinsurgencies, the War on Drugs and its translation into the war on deforestation, the conversion of forests into commodities and in capitalist conservation interventions, notions of forests continue to condition our responses to their destruction. Re(in)surgent Forests traces the contours of the forest through the relations and languages that constitute them. Forests are living relations, living languages. In the forest, language is relation, death nourishing life; germination, decomposition is language. To reclaim forest futures, is to reclaim the relations that compose them, the languages that compose relations, those that contribute to life’s ongoingness.

Re(in)surgent Forests is a curatorial platform developed in response to the ecocidal destruction of forests. Re(in)surgent Forests is grounded in learning from and listening to forests and those who defend them, to the relations of death nourishing life, and the loss of those generative relations. Through workshops and dialogues and the development of films for forest futurities, the project works to repair and reclaim the relations and languages of lost forest futures. Listening to forests, this project dissolves language and its conditioning orientation, opening to the relations and languages that come together in insurgent response to war. It involves work with Indigenous film collectives that return the colonizer’s gaze through the reclamation of relations and languages in ceremonial contexts. Forest futurist film interrupts notions of forests framed in terms of insurgencies, narco-deforestation and war in Colombia, with forests that exist outside of our gaze. The curatorial project also involves the development of the installation Listening to Forests, an immersive experience of the forest through the embodied language of coca, a plant deeply connected to Colombia’s war (on forests), and the origin of the language of the forest that orients the future for Indigenous communities.