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Paper short abstract

The presentation introduces The Lack of Forest, an art project developed in the post-hurricane Tuchola Forest examining forests as political and socio-ecological assemblages. Through a communal eco-commemorative land art installation, it explores loss, memory, and ways of living within forest ruin.

Paper long abstract

Lack of Forest is a land-based artistic and research project situated in the post-hurricane landscape of the Bory Tucholskie forests in northern Poland—an area shaped by ecological destruction, historical violence, and state-led forest governance. Drawing on perspectives from forest anthropology, the project approaches the forest as a socio-ecological and political assemblage co-produced by human, more-than-human, and institutional actors.

At the centre of the project is the Mound, a commemorative land art installation constructed from approximately 120 uprooted trees and roots left behind by the storm. Rather than restoring order or productivity, the Mound functions as an autonomous site of encounter, where local memories, ecological processes, and power relations embedded in forest management intersect. It stimulates practices that challenges dominant narratives of recovery, legibility, and control of land that emerge in the aftermath of environmental disasters.

Through long-term observation and participation in processes of decay, regrowth, and abandonment, Lack of Forest foregrounds the forest as a liminal and polarised space—simultaneously present and absent, living and managed. The project explores how local communities experience loss, precarity, and responsibility while navigating imposed frameworks of forest renewal and territorialisation.

Situated within post-war and post-socialist Eastern European contexts, Lack of Forest draws parallels between ecological regeneration and intergenerational trauma. By attending to relational practices of care, memory, and belonging, the project proposes an ontological reworlding that contributes to broader discussions on how forests are politically produced, culturally inhabited, and contested as sites where a “complex we” emerges across human and more-than-human relations.