Over the last 250 years, large-scale industry has increasingly capitalised on natural resources in a process where the mapping of the forest has been singularly focused on reducing both land and trees to raw materials. Rönicke dares the opposite movement: a ‘de-mapping’ of the forest and a decentralisation of the modern gaze that always places humans as the natural centre of everything. Inspired by biologist Suzanne Simard’s concept of network topologies, her non-linear, interdisciplinary film explores human and non-human impacts on Northern forests since they started to form after the last ice age. Based on her installation of the same name, Drifting Woods blends together stories from the northern forest, anthropological research, historical archive material and factual knowledge with personal interviews and pictorial recordings of the forest’s own time, life and decay.
At once academically distant and inspiringly poetic, the film charts the militaristic, colonial, and racist histories of our relation to nature, aiming to reignite hope in our capacity to question our consumption, protect what we have left, and revive a more communal way to live.
