gb agency

The exhibition Drifting Forest brings together a variety of materials, references and conflicting experiences from one of Scandinavia’s most forest-dense counties, Gävleborg. Through recurring field studies, hiking observations and time-based notes in the form of moving images and sounds, the Danish artist Pia Rönicke has moved in and carefully mapped different tracks in the changing forest landscape around Ockelbo and how it spreads across municipal boundaries.

Through the artistic research’s web of voices - and how they are brought together in Rönicke’s spatial design, installations, drawings and multi-channel video works at Silvanum, the former forest museum in Gävle - the forest emerges, considered both as a space and as a concept, in its fluid state. The forest drives. But how, in what patterns and with what species richness it can move is far from a given. The forest is instead something that we, humans and other species, do together; a vital negotiation, sandwiched between different needs, interests and interpretive precedents. So, what do we do with the forest?

The exhibition Drifting Forest is a collaboration between Kultur Gävleborg and Gävle Konstcentrum.