Mia + Eric | In a Strange Place

×

Expand

Mia + Eric, “ In a Strange Place,” 2024

video still from 9-channel video installation (courtesy of the artists)

In a Strange Place is a meditative 9-channel video installation and social engagement project that delves into the future of our forests and those who care for them.

Born out of a multi-year, international research and engagement process with communities in England, Germany, and Norway, In a Strange Place features 150 foresters, ecologists, activists, conservationists and land keepers performing abstract, slow-motion “dances” in the woods. These improvised choreographies are reflections of the participant’s care work, their connection to their local forest, and their role in an uncertain multi-species future.

The aim of In a Strange Place is to translate the complex knowledge and expertise of forest caretakers into emotional and visual gestures for a non-science audience. Showing forest work as an embodied practice, each video—a type of slow portraiture—captures the forest workers waist up and wearing handmade masks of imagined future forest creature. The culminating installation of In a Strange Place is comprised of nine separate videos. As audiences enter into the installation they are surrounded by woodlands and will be met by the forest workers performing the gestural reflections of their work. Through a series of overlapping, interacting, and individual performances, audiences are asked to move within the installation—a digital forest—becoming active in their viewing. The total running time of the installation is 2 hours 4 minutes.

Artists’ Talk: Thursday, January 23, 2025 | 6 pm