Becoming Forest Academy is an initiative of writer and lecturer Dirk Vis emerging from a number of experiences living and working in various forests in Europe and South America. The Becoming Forest Academy is a school for studying the broken relationship between modern subjects and the natural environment, and aims to facilitate the study of ecologies of creativity and nature through a mixture of theory and practice.
The Mizarai workshop week in the woods is specifically dedicated to not-knowing: as the negative capability crucial for art and design production — particularly researchbased — it is essential to all naturecultures. Parallel to traditional academic learning, not-knowing supports alternative ways of sensing and entering in relation with both artistic and more-than-human ecologies. How has this non-knowledge been described and passed on by various historical cultures? How to make space for it, and fine-tune the capacity to linger in uncertainty and pay attention to the role of the untranslatable in the encounter with complex environments?
The program includes lecture presentations, reading sessions, practical workshops, individual and collective activities, and will be partly established on the grounds in cooperation with all participants. Forest activities may include hiking, tree climbing, overnighting outdoors, etc. Campfire and sauna available. Cooking is a joint effort!
Elements from the program will be developed in collaboration with curator Lucia Pietroiusti.
About the lecturers
Lucia Pietroiusti is a London-based curator, programmer and organisational strategist, working at the intersection of art, ecology and systems, often outside the exhibition space. As Head of Ecologies at Serpentine, Pietroiusti founded the the General Ecology project and the Ecologies department. Her co-publications include a major forthcoming reader that traces six years of “The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish”; the readers “Morethan-Human”; “Microhabitable” and “Mal Journal PLANTSEX”. Pietroiusti teaches and lectures internationally and was recently Professor of the Interior Ecologies module at HEAD – Genève’s MA Interior Architecture.
Dirk Vis is a writer from the Netherlands, and writes fiction, essays, scripts, and poetry. His books have been published in Dutch and English, most recently the novel “Paren of de kunst van de slaapkamer”, and the (anti-)manual for artistic research “Research for People Who (Think They) Would Rather Create”. Vis has presented and directed animations, chapbooks, videos, performances and websites with his texts. He is contributing editor of Dutch literary magazine De Gids (The Guide), teaches and lectures internationally and is a research lecturer at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague.
