Creative Fieldwork in Forest Plantations: seeking resonance in precarious landscapes

This interactive exposition reveals the processes and findings of an artistic research project which uses sited creative practices - including field recordings, sound-making, movement and song - to explore Portuguese forest plantations. This creative field work responds to pressing global issues, including the effects of a warming climate, which reverberate through precarious, flammable landscapes such as the pine and eucalyptus plantations of central Portugal. These are deeply ambivalent, contested places. Around the planted and industrially extracted trees hangs a legacy of state afforestation and rural depopulation, as well as present fire risks. They are an example of ‘cheap nature’ (Moore and Patel 2018), where trees are treated as a resource to be extracted as efficiently as possible. The plantations are also full of surprising beauty, feral happenings and ‘unruly edges’ (Tsing 2015) that soften and counteract the straight lines of industrial extraction. The research focuses on affective and resonant materialities – how it feels to be in these spaces. Such feelings arise from the trees labouring for humans and being life-limited because of this, from their characterisation as flammable ‘fuel load’ and risky materialities, and from their presence as living beings, communities, and homes for multiple species. The creative field work reaches into these contradictory feelings to foster a deeper, more nuanced understanding of these increasingly precarious landscapes. It seeks new ways of expressing our relationships with other-than-humans in such places, alongside creative ways of being, which might transform perspectives of what they are and what they are for. The project also aims to explore the controlled extraction of nature, alongside how it feels to live in landscapes that are increasingly risky and outside the control of humans. keywords: forest plantations, creative field work, Multispecies ethnography, cheap nature, Industrial nature, Portugal, Wildfire, precarious landscapes, Climate Change