Photo and text by Francesca Romana Rietti
Transform-action
Hoverdal Plantage, Saturday 17th of August 2024
All the activities of our fourth day of work took place in a forest, Hoverdal Plantage. Situated at about 15 kilometers from Ringkøbing, it has been planted in 1891 to reduce sand drift on the moors between the villages of Hover and Torsted. There you can still experience the inland dunes, in Danish called indsande. Some of us - not me - spent there also the night, sleeping in the wooden shelters. We opened the session with a walking lecture in the forest led by Leo Valentin Lindblom from the Forestry Research Centre in Sweden. Through his gaze and his knowledge, we could look at the nature beyond its apparent uniformity. We could feel the living spirit of a constant transformation. According with this process of mutation we ended the day going deeper. The shamanistic journey led by the Swedish actress Petra Lindblom (Gestalt therapist and shamanistic practitioner) had the task to meet our power animal. It has been an experience to dialogue with a non-ordinary reality following the principles and the ritual of an ancestral tradition. Back from our personal journey, we stood up in a circle thanking the earth. I felt this was like an echo generated by the celebration of the Pacha Mama we had the previous night. Thanks to the Argentinians members of the working group, we have been introduced to this Inca ritual celebrated in the South-American countries the first of August. This day has a special task according with the Inca culture and beliefs. It is a day devoted to thank the earth for what it is constantly giving us and the ritual consists in preparing offers that have to be buried under the earth: it is a day to give back and not to take. Lightning a big fire the space is smoked with myrrh.
My perception is that the programme of “Art-Nature Lab Workshops and Lectures” is orchestrated and organised by Antonella Diana around some precise tasks, challenges and risks. Sometime in a common way, sometime through a personal path, we have always been called to collaborate with an active and participating attitude. This is how, I felt, a small and temporary community was built up around different small and daily research’s project.
What was the task of today? Which of our senses were most involved? How did we spend an entire day in a forest? How the five actress and the musicians have re-organized their work there? How did they dialogue with this new landscape, with its opportunities and difficulties? How did they deal and play with the Danish unpredictable weather conditions?
Many other questions inhabit me today. What I write now, it is just a first glimpse which opens up a reflection that needs longer time to choose and find “my” words and a bigger distance from the experience I lived.
I felt that today in the forest we have been following some previous paths that explore it, thinking about our presence there. They prepare for us some ‘stations’, they imagine us working within the environment and experiencing all its possibilities and limits. This was the case of the bio-installation created by Antonella Diana with Maximiliano Bini (theatre technician and light designer) and Cristina Maria Aimaretti (visual artist and researcher focused on social and environmental conflicts), they are both from Argentina. Made only by flexible willow trunks and seaweed, the structure was located in the forest just half-ready. We had to finish the second half of it which is mirroring the first. We have to build the second image of the Fibonacci sequence - also known as the golden number or divine proportion - to give life to the bio-installation called Listen the forest. The ground had been measured, pickets and ropes had been fixed to it. The second half of the installation was drawn on earth with a purple chalk. The nature gave us one of its possible answers. Drilling the soil with manual and electrics instruments we met stones and deep roots. It took us a lot of time and hard work to remove them. We could not finish the installation, but we had the beautiful chance to experience the power of nature and its unpredictability. Knowing Antonella, since many years, I could not imagine a better result for her experiment today.
On the top of her very high metal ladder, she was looking at us working in her temporary natural lab, giving us tasks, encouraging us to listen the nature. Especially, its no.
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