S3E4: FORESTS
Transcript
LK: Lutz Koepnick
UB: Ursula Biemann
MJ: Malu Jorge
JG: Jennifer Gutman
MA: Mark Anderson
INTRODUCTION
MJ:
I think biodiversity it’s a magical thing.
LK:
This is Vanderbilt biologist Malu Jorge, speaking about her research on animal and plant life in the Amazon rainforest.
MJ:
If you think about it, it is like this accumulation of change.
LK:
This fascination with the forest’s diversity has been with her for a long time.
MJ:
Since I was a kid, I get into like a, a patch of forest and it feels, just, feels life. My religion is going to the forest.
LK:
Malu’s work often requires highly repetitive tasks. She sits still for hours on end. She takes note of minute changes in small pieces of land. She tags different animals or plants and awaits what might happen to them in the days or weeks to come. In her role as a conservation ecologist, Malu understands the forest as a moving text and her work as that of a reader who is trying to decipher the forest’s diverse signs and signals, its language so to speak:
MJ
I trained myself to do that I feel like it’s kind of a cool thing that you can walk and read the forest. I’m not quite there yet. I hope one day I can be like that but yeah, but eventually you can, if you, if you stay in the forest for long enough. I think you can.
LK:
The magical diversity of forests has been under enormous pressure over the last decade. The various effects of human intervention—such as fires and deforestation—disturb their natural cycles and their wonderous ability to produce and reproduce multispecies interactions day by day. With little abatement in sight, there is increasingly less to read and as a result less to learn in today’s forests. Their voices are muted, their many languages become ever more extinct. Or so it seems at least.
Earlier in this season, we heard about the work of Seri Robinson and Shinji Turner-Yamamoto and their approach to wood as an artistic medium. In today’s episode of Art of Interference, we speak with Ursula Biemann, a Swiss artist based in Zurich, whose work over the last decades has gone a long way to reveal and engage with the diverse intelligences of nonhuman entities, the forest’s mind as she calls it in one of her works. Based on meticulous research, her films and video installations have shown at numerous galleries, museums, and biennials around the globe. They consistently ask tough questions about our planetary emergencies; they urge us to think outside the box of Western science and extractive reason. In several works and installations, Biemann has approached forests in the Amazon and the Andes as unique places of insight and transformation that epitomize the very essence of planetary life. These forests enable physical and metaphysical encounters we simply can’t afford to lose. They are texts in the word’s original meaning: woven fabrics; textures that expand the limits of our existing languages, or knowledge, as they showcase the interdependence of all things living.
PART ONE
Lutz Koepnick:
Ursula Biemann is an artist, critic, writer, and video essayist. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves a lot of fieldwork, which she has mostly carried out in remote locations from Greenland to Amazonia. At the heart of her work are questions of climate change, the relationship of human and nonhumam entities on our damaged planet, and in more recent years: a strong dedication to indigenous knowledge systems. Her work encourages us to entertain more humble interactions with what is not us, but at the same time, her practice is driven by maximalist ambitions, huge questions in other words. Later in this program we will talk in more detail about videos such as Forest Law and Forest Mind, two bold and intellectually demanding works that investigate the intelligence of forests and how Western science and Andean and Amazonian cosmologies offer different approaches to understand their life. To kick off our conversation, however, I wanted to know more about the steps that took Ursula over the last decades to make this kind of work, to ask big questions for which direct answers are often out of reach.
Ursula Biemann:
I think that the big scale of my videos are actually there from the beginning. I was very interested in making my own observations about the process of globalization. When I came out of art school, it was just the end of the eighties and and it was really becoming very clear what globalization means for places like the Mexican border. So, for about 10 years I got very involved in migration movements, these global trends of international labor divisions. But then about 2010 or 2011 I started to shift to a completely different set of questions, and I was looking for something big to sink my teeth in for the next 10 years.
LK:
That big thing could be none other than climate change and the broader ecological and social crises it embodies. Ursula began to research ecologies of water, which led her to what would become a long-standing focus in her work: the Amazon.
UB:
While doing all this research I inevitably came across indigenous territories. That was inevitable because those, for the most part, are the ones that are actually left intact in the Amazon. Everything else is practically destroyed. And so that’s where the water is still good and the forest is there and the species are alive, and I was wondering how come. That’s how I started to get interested in their knowledge system.
LK:
Ursula’s projects involve a lot of research and preparation. Forest Mind, for example, involved extended field work in Columbia, but also time-consuming collaborations with scientists back in Zurich. When I think about her body of work over the last two decades, I wonder how she selects these projects. Does she find them, or do they find her?
UB:
I think it’s a bit of both actually. In the case of deep weather, which is one of the earliest short videos on climate change of 2013, I went to Bangladesh to do some filming and I did enormous amounts of research on all the water problems that they have. I filmed some of them and and I came back and I only thought one particular scene was actually worth using in a video. It was the building of an embankment or the repair of embankments on the outer rim of the delta where people are trying to protect themselves from the rising sea. That was a very powerful scene, but that in itself didn’t make a video yet, and so I let it sit there for a year, and then I got an invitation from the University of Edmonton to come to a conference and show an older oil video, Black Sea Files.
And they said, we will take you up to the tar sands if you’d like. And then instantly I knew, now I have a video, now I have a project. Now I can combine the source of climate change with these enormous, large scale tar sands extraction areas with the, some of the actions that people take o n a daily basis trying to protect their villages from the rising sea
LK:
The types of projects that Ursula pursues take time. [More concrete explanation of why]. But the art world, and more specifically the art market, tends to work at a very different kind of pace.
UB:
These pressures emerge in my life at least when I get commissioned to do new work.
It’s so much better if I can just decide on my own rhythm. And that was the exceptional thing with the last commission that I got from the National University of Columbia in Bogota because the curator there, she understood that she doesn’t need to pressure me and give me a schedule and give me restrictions as to what to do and not to do. For the first two years I didn’t know. Where my role as an artist was in that project. And then suddenly I was able to knock out several audio visual works that we could then show, no big deal. I can do it, but I need time.
LK:
Let’s hear a little about Forest Law, a two-channel video installation, released in 2014, with a run time of 38 minutes. It draws on a series of legal cases indigenous people of the Sarayaku region launched against oil-and-mining activities in the Ecuadorian Amazon, one of the most bio-diverse areas on Earth. Based on their cosmology, their respect for the animacy of nonhuman entities, local leaders and activists brought the forest to court and pleaded for the rights of nature. The project relied on collaborative research with the artist and Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares. In the video, we also hear from thinkers and activists such as José Gualinga, who describes the forest as a biodiverse web of life essential for Indigenous wellbeing, Kichwa politicians and constitutional lawyers such as Nina Pacari, Sarayaku community leaders like Franco Viteri who took on an important role in the fight against extraction industries. In one sequence, we see Vitero standing in front of a small river that cuts through a dense forest section. He speaks calmly and deliberately, the gentle movement of his hands helping to make his case:
[voiceover translation] How did we defend ourselves in Court? Based on arguments that have to do with our cultural, our spiritual tradition and life. For instance, the oil company and the State don’t understand the relationship we have to the sacred. For ourselves, this is sacred, every plant has the right to live. Every plant is useful for the indigenous people. And this cannot be destroyed because we live on it. If we destroy our nature, we destroy ourselves.
LK:
Here’s how Ursula, more than a decade after the film’s production, recalls some of its key ambitions:
UB:
At the time when we made the film and the preliminary research, the rights of nature was really not a big topic. Hardly anyone knew about it. And the discussion there about the Amazon was much more about a critique of the extractive practices there. And for me, this piece became like a shift in itself. We went there and had to document this extraction and listen to them and that was certainly very interesting, but I more and more sensed that we needed to shift more towards their cosmology. What is it that make them think so differently? Luckily we have a very rich philosophical debate in Latin America around these topics.
INTERFERENCE ONE
JG:
Let me cut in here for a moment.
LK:
What’s on your mind, Jen?
XX:
Well, Lutz, discussions about the voice of nonhuman entities always make me a little uneasy.
LK:
How so?
JG:
I understand that people might want to argue for more reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman things and grant animal, rivers, plants, or forests certain rights, not just a voice, but legal standing, rights. But isn’t this a wishful fantasy at best. How do we know what forests want? How can we represent them and their presumed claims in court?
LK:
I hear you. Recent attempts to grant nature rights have shown rather mixed results. Neither Ecuador or Bolivia, who added rights of nature to their constitutions around 2008, nor New Zealand, Panama, Uganda, or India, have really succeeded in barring extractive practices and their impact on local communities.
JG:
But even beyond such pragmatic concerns, isn’t it somewhat arrogant to assume that rivers, trees, or mountains should enjoy the same rights as humans. We might want to grant them certain legal protections, but how in the end can we really do this if nonhuman entities lack a clear language to express or communicate their abuse.
LK:
Keep in mind, though Jen, that there are many other entities that enjoy legal standing even if they don’t breathe, feel, or think like human subjects. In 1886 the US Supreme Court granted rights to private corporations. So, if abstract corporations enjoy legal standing, why shouldn’t trees and forests do the same?
JG:
Alright. But then, again, who and how will anyone represent the forest? Things nonhuman might be alive, but how do we pick up their language and voice to represent them?
LK:
It’s really exciting to hear about your concerns, Jen. The issue of rights of nature is one of the big questions that drives Ursula Biemann’s work. It’s something I have been trying to wrap my head around for some time as it seems critical to address issues of climate change and how we may mitigate our human footprint on this planet. I recently talked to Mark Anderson, a professor at the University of Georgia, who has written a book about this question and its treatment in the arts and literature. One of his main points is to say that many of our thoughts about legal representation rest on false assumptions about humans as the only beings able to represent anything, to have a voice. The world in his view is semiotic through and through—and Indigenous people in the Andes and Amazonia know more than anyone else about this:
MA:
I mean, I think it’s intuitive because children speak to the world, right? They talk to plants and animals. So it’s kind of the sense that there is always communication going on, but then, you know, we try to kind of downplay certain forms of communication over symbolic representation. The premise of science is that the world speaks for itself and we have to interpret it, right? So it, like semiotics is directly involved, it’s just that they don’t always, view it as semiotics. But it’s still, the premise is that the world communicates knowledge about itself to us. So, I don’t think that there’s necessarily like a giant leak in logic. It’s just kind of different approaches to the same issue of the apprehension of the world and interaction with the world.
LK:
Mark’s point is this, I think: nature is at least as capable of representation and communication as what the West considers human civilization.
JG:
It just teems with different forms of intelligence.
LK:
Right. It speaks in many voices we simply don’t understand. Our bandwidth is just too narrow.
JG:
And because it has a voice, I assume, we just need to learn how to listen better to what it may be saying.
LK:
Correct. And art is a perfect medium for such listening, for translating nature’s thoughts, as long as we recognize that any such translation is always incomplete, never a one to one copy.
MA:
Within indigenous tradition there is no term for nature or the human. They see themselves as spokesperson for the larger society that is the environment, and they perform shamanistic ceremonies and have other forms of communication with the natural entities, and then they bring those to the table. But of course, that would require, you believing in their ontology, which would probably not happen in the Western world. But you can combine different approaches to the problems. You can’t ask, well, do fish want to have contaminants in their body. Like you can’t really say, well, fish don’t wanna have those. But illness is a form of communication. It’s like the symptoms are communicating that they are not well. Right. So in that sense you could say, well, they don’t want to have contaminants in their river. I think a lot of things are like very common sense.
JG:
Is it common sense, though? Given recent rollbacks in environmental policy and regulation in the US, I am not at all convinced that rights of nature legislation will help us to get on a better political path again.
LK:
Do you fear political backlash?
JG:
Absolutely. I feel the US is not ready to give up its investments in unfettered progress at the expense of the natural environment. To extend rights to nature, to curb our enthusiasm about extracting natural resources, wouldn’t this cause all kinds of people to ridicule future environmental visions? I can hear it in my mind already.
LK:
True enough. But let’s not forget that some of the very first right of nature laws were passed in the US itself, around 2006 when the Tamaqua Borough in Pennsylvaniafought toxic sludge dumping, and then allowed residents to sue on the behalf of the environment for violations recognizing rights for local ecosystems. Mark reminded me of this and insisted that we need to think of the rights of nature movement as a grassroots endeavor, not a top down process.
MA:
The first rights of nature legislation in the world was passed in Pennsylvania, so I think there is a lot of interest in the United States. The problem is, of course, that national and state law always supersede local law. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t happen ever. It’s just gonna be a slow process. It’ll probably have to be a grassroots effort and begin kind of more locally and then eventually build up to, possibly to state levels and then possibly from there move to the national level.
JG:
Interesting. He surely has a point there.
LK:
I agree. And suggest we continue this discussion in a future episode. Let it build up, as Mark suggests. And for now return to Ursula Biemann. Her work, I think, provides lots of food for thought for such discussions.
PART 2
David Neill [in Forest Law]:
There, there are some estimates that there are about 350,000 species of flower flowering plants in the world, but only 300,000 of those are known and named so that we have 50,000 to go.
LK:
This is the voice of the late David Neill, a botanist who dedicated much of his research in the Amazon. In this interview, he adds an intriguing perspective about multispecies diversity to Ursula Biemann’s 2014 video Forest Law
David Neill:
So this is the enjoyable part of botany, finding new plants and new species and being able to name them and illustrate them and describe them. And of course the downside is of it is realizing that many, much of this is disappearing before our our eyes. Modern methods of transportation, the roads and the oil pipelines and so forth make it possible for us to get to these remote places, which were inaccessible before, but they also lead to the destruction of the sites. So it’s a very kind of bittersweet kind of feeling that doing field work in botany in Ecuador.
LK:
Ursula Biemann’s work over the last decade is quite familiar with the bittersweet dynamic of doing field work in remote eras. She often records things that face possible extinction, discovering unexpected sights and meanings as they are about to vanish for good. Yet the more she has come to engage with different Amazonian systems of knowing, the less she holds on to Western ideas of linear time and progress. Her forests, with all their remaining diversity, their complex cycles of life, their cohabitation and sociality, they abound with plural temporalities. As an artist studying the entanglements of human and nonhuman times, she knows all too well that our hunger for progressive time often overshadows our ability to encounter the unexpected and wondrous. Neither life, nor art, nor science follows a simple pattern of questions and answers, a system in which we check-off-boxes and then simply move on to other things.
UB:
You cannot write a concept like for a science foundation, or for a documentary film even where you know already all the answers and you can already tell the funders, yeah, this is what I’m going to find. For me it’s really an adventure all the way. And the insights come in the most unexpected moments, but I guess that’s true for science as well.
LK:
Many of the Ursula’s question might never receive a full answer. But many of them finds some of her answers while she is working in the editing room and brings different materials together
UB:
The moment of constructing the whole meaning of the film is done at the editing table, obviously. And of course I have a number of questions prepared for interviews before I go into the field. The more I know how I work, the better I can prepare those questions. But in the end, it’s it’s decisions on the spot.
When I was in the field in the Amazon and we interviewed this traditional medic on the plants and all these things, and suddenly we had the idea of asking him: how are you initiated to be a shaman? Just as out of curiosity at the end of the interview. And then he came with this fantastical story of his experience, and I knew instantly this will be part of this artwork. This is not documentary material. This is so suggestive and so imaginative.
LK:
Ursula’s work, even or precisely when it probes scientific ways of knowing the world, is never a mere illustration of scientific inquiry or communication. On the contrary, her work blends the real and the imaginative in order to speculate about things that at once challenge and exceed what counts as evidence in western scientific discourse. Her film Forest Mind of 2022 is a great case in point. Here’s how it opens:
Ursula Biemann [in Forest Mind]:
In this Amazonian territory, indigenous people have always known that knowledge emerges from the encounter with the land and its living beings.
LK:
Forest Mind is set in the Amazonian forests of Colombia, and it offers a prolonged mediation on the physics and metaphysics of plants and plant-human relationships. This includes the windows of knowledge opened by Ayahuasca, but also the mind-bending advances in western science that use DNA code to model and preserve the forest’s diversity. As the camera travels over a section of dense forest and a second image offers a close-up of a tree’s trunk and tangled root structure, the voiceover continues:
Ursula Biemann [in Forest Mind]:
All knowledge comes from here. The territory is the maximus teacher. Knowledge is understood as the practice of living in relation with all beings who inhabit this space. The territory is alive, cognitive and spirited. The forest is a field of mind. To mentally engage the forest is what generates reality here. The forest and the perception of the forest is one of the same thing.
LK:
Our contemporary world places enormous pressures on science and scientific knowledge. There’s so much disbelief in even most common sense scientific practices. One response that been to emphasize the evidentiary base of scientific methods. Ursula’s artistic practice, however reminds us of the fact that a good deal of speculative elements are necessary to produce a richer form of knowledge no matter what the anti-science faction is saying right now.
UB:
Parallel to biodiversity, we need epistemic diversity that is allowed and legitimized in universities that is not only defending the kind of the scientific paradigm. I think that’s very important because we understand now how much the mind is entangled with the natural world , and that if we want to save the natural world, we also need to save the knowledge that has been produced during evolution around that forest.
LK:
Ursula’s ideas of epistemic diversity and justice are especially resonant in times where climate denialism leads to massive defunding of research. Epistemic diversity isn’t a plea to ignore scientific insight and move us back to the Middle Ages. It simply asks us to make more space for other ways of knowing the world and include insights as they emerge from indigenous cosmologies or artistic practices. What it certainly does not mean is to shut down world-renowned institutions of climate research such as NCAR in Boulder, Colorado, the National Center for Atmospheric Research that is, to prohibit further inquiry because it may highlight the damaging effects of petro-capitalism.
INTERFERENCE TWO
Kondiaronk [in Dialogues with the Future]:
Can you accuse my people of robbing other nations of their lands? You cannot.
Lahontan [in Dialogues with the Future]:
Why do you want to keep all this land? This land, Conran is vast beyond measure, yet it remains untamed, untouched. The greatest freedom we can possess is the freedom to move and settle anywhere we like.
Kondiaronk [in Dialogues with the Future]:
You mean freedom to dispossess others? Freedom to us. It is to master our own body. I do what I please, whereas your body and soul are doomed to depend on your great captain, the Viceroy, a myriad of people who rank above you. You don’t have freedom.
JG:
What are we listening to, here?
LK:
It’s a short segment, Jen, taken from Ursula Biemann’s 2026 video installation Dialogues with the Future.
JG:
Oh, interesting! Who is Kondiaronk? Whose voices do we witness here?
LK:
The piece—which is a two-channel video projection—restages historical conversations between Baron de Lahontan, a French officer stationed in Quebec, and a Wendat (or Huron) elder and philosopher Kondiaronk back in the 1690s. It’s a costume drama of sorts, based on the published records of these conversations; they widely circulated among European intellectuals during the early eighteenth-century.
JG:
A costume drama? That doesn’t seem to be Biemann’s usual genre. I assume the “future” of its title is meant to be our future, and the whole piece is intended to bring us into a conversation with things we have forgotten, or have chosen to forget.
LK:
Yeah. And it is really also meant to allow these forgotten pasts, and their unfulfilled promises and claims, to interfere with our own present. Because they aren’t past after all. To be honest, I think of this whole piece as a moment of interference at its best. Here’s how Biemann herself describes the project.
UB:
We always think of the Enlightenment philosophers as lonely people who kind of plot out these thoughts in their studios alone, and now it turns out they were actually very inspired by this intercultural dialogue and the indigenous critique that he voiced on European society, which was of course an aristocratic society at the time.
JG:
What I hear her say here is that the European enlightenment learned quite a bit from non-European sources but also could have been more enlightened about itself if it had been a better listener.
LK:
Which is perhaps just another way of saying that we have never been as modern and enlightened as we in the West have claimed to be. In this piece, Kondiaronk repeatedly argues that just or democratic societies will inevitably fail if they fail to develop reciprocal relationships with the natural world, with the elements.
JG:
The point being that we treat each other similar to how we treat the world that surrounds us, that enables us.
LK:
Yes. I think of this insight as perhaps more relevant today than ever before. But for Biemann, these dialogues with the future also echo some of the conversations she herself had with indigenous leaders in the Amazon in the projects we discussed earlier.
UB:
This whole setup between these historic characters is actually a bit of a reflection of my own experience with the leader of the Inga. We also created this kind of cosmopolitical space and acted in a cosmopolitical diplomacy to have an intercultural conversation that we might debate certain ideas. But it always stays friendly. And this is something we don’t see very much anymore in the politics.
JG:
I like the idea of cosmopolitical conversations, of diplomacy, as a model of what in this podcast we call the art of interference. It’s cross-cultural, cross-spatial, and cross-temporal.
LK:
It surely reminds us to never take progress for granted. Time never proceeds like an arrow or a river. And neither does the history of democracy or justice. Let’s listen to one more segment of Dialogues with Future before we return to the conversation with Ursula.
Lahontan [in Dialogues with the Future] :
You traveled in Europe, what have you learned from seeing it for yourself? Surely you desire the advancement we bring.
Kondiaronk [in Dialogues with the Future]:
Lahonton, your words carry the weight of a man who believes his ways are superior. But tell me what is advancement? If it strips us of our harmony with each other and our mother Earth. I heard in France, poor men are tortured until they confess to everything they’re accused of. Even the women are not exempt from this terrible cruelty. But you can’t blame the whole world for the mistakes of a few. The judges make every effort to find out whether or not a statement is true or false, and if they discover false witnesses, those liars are sentenced to death without fail. These aren’t single events. I walked from Paris to Versailles one day. And I met a farmer who was to be imprisoned for catching hairs, and I met another who was to be sent to the galleys ’cause he had a little bag of salt. These poor men were being punished for trying to feed their families. The word law as you use it doesn’t mean justice.
LK:
Biemann’s Dialogues with the Future examines forgotten histories and paths unrealized. I think its right to say that this project also offers a mirror of Biemann’s own artistic practice—specifically, her commitment to fostering dialogue between distinct cultures and knowledge systems. Careful listening and collaborative practice are at the heart of most of her projects. How, she asks, can we engage with alternative traditions of knowing without appropriating or instrumentalizing them.
JG:
A question, if you ask me, we cannot ask ourselves often enough.
PART THREE
LK:
Many of Ursula Biemann’s videos choose two-channel format as a formal choice amid this. It’s an apt decision, reflecting key frameworks of indigenous epistemologies in the Amazon, their stress on plurality and multiperspectivalism. I want to return once more to Biemann’s work in Columbia to which I alluded to earlier in the program already. One of its central concerns is how artists can engage meaningfully with other ways of knowing and sensing the world without seeking to extract them or subordinate them to her own perspective? How can one practice genuine intellectual humility and deep listening?
UB:
That is a question that that I’ve been mulling around for a long time. One thing is not to stay stuck with the purely critical approach. Which is something that I think I did much more in the beginning of my video career. We can always focus on how bad it is to do extraction, but it doesn’t propose anything new yet. And I think it’s really important. That as artists we have a more propositional practice now that we have something to look forward to, to be working on. Because it’s not enough to critique also because it has become always worse and worse. Not at all better with critique.
LK:
Rather than critique, Ursula’s work seeks to model different kinds of relationships that could carry us beyond a purely extractive paradigm.
UB:
The experience is always so much more complicated and never ends up where you plan it to be . With Forest Law, we made interviews with people we had contacted previously. And once we have documented it, we are leaving and doing the rest on the editing table back home. But with the big project in Colombia
LK:
Ursula’s referring to her collaborative project Devenir Universidad.
UB:
With the big project in Colombia I really got more involved in collaborating with a community, an indigenous community, and on a project that they had defined. And I had to then figure out what could my role possibly be and how can I work with them.
LK:
Launched around 2020, Devenir Universidad seeks to establish what she terms a “biocultural university” situated in the ecologically significant zone between the Colombian Andes and the Amazonian lowlands. It’s a project that wants to develop a space of learning that integrates indigenous epistemologies to foreground the ethical relationship between human and non-human worlds. Rather than treating indigenous knowledge as a resource to be extracted or archived, the project proposes an alternative model of education rooted in principles of reciprocal cohabitation with the natural environment.
UB:
I made an agreement with the Indigenous leader of that community saying that I’m very willing to help you conceptualize and set up an Indigenous university in your territories. I do what I can to help doing that.On the other hand, I would like to be able to conduct my own research in your territory. And he agreed to that. And I think it was a fair exchange because I also wanted to to experiment and to grow in a project, so this project included a number of. Strands. Some had more to do with practical things and setting up workshops and helping to connect them to international partners and funders. On the other hand, I started to think what my role as an artist could be in producing audiovisual materials in part for them, and how I could create installations that I could then show in the art context also to mediate this project into the art and intellectual world that I’m used to.
LK:
Ursula’s project Forest Mind grew out of this collaboration as well. It’s a visual journey that pairs stunning footage of the Amazon with interviews Urusla carried out with indigenous elders and shamans. It also weaves in cutting-edge DNA research from the University of Zurich, using graphic insets that visualize the complex intelligence of nature and the forest.
The project makes a bold case: ancient medicinal traditions—like ayahuasca ceremonies—aren’t at odds with modern science. In fact, they’re looking for the same thing. Whether it’s through a microscope or a ceremony, both are trying to expand the human mind, explore the entanglements of the human and the more-than-human, and help us connect with the deep, living intelligence of the natural world.
Ursula Biemann [in Forest Mind]:
There is no framework within modern science to understand the intelligence of ayahuasca, but science does recognize the intelligence of plants in more general terms, plant cells use a similar signaling system to neurons. They have the capacity of making decisions as complex as within the brain. Plants can compute up to 20 different chemical and physical parameters. Aside from light, humidity, and temperature, they can detect magnetic field pathogens, heavy metal. Electrical field vibration sounds and gravity. Plants have no need for a brain because they are decentralized hyperconnected systems. They are vast neural networks. The size of ecosystems the plant two communicates through chemistry, and part of that chemistry are neural transmitters through a curious coevolution. These transmitters happen to fit into receptors in the human brain, creating a unique mode of telepathic communication between the plant and the person who ingests it. The connection between the vegetal mind and the human brain produces hyper communication.
LK:
Forest Mind is in many ways Ursula’s most ambitious and challenging work thus far. It seeks to build bridges between different systems of knowing the world, indigenous plant medicine and Western microbiological research. It also suggests continuities between what may happen to the human mind during ayahuasca ceremonies and what we do when engaging with art of all sorts. The forest, as we discussed earlier in this program, appears as deeply semiotic; it has a mind of its own, it perceives and registers and represents the world through signs and languages far different than human ones. It thinks and thereby challenges what we typically consider thinking, which is the life of the human mind.
UB:
Forest Mind is a video work. It is also a book that tries to make sense and bring some of these thoughts a bit into an order. In the film, I wondered for the longest time, what on earth could I contribute to this very complex situation in the south of Columbia? People who have been isolated in the forest for 30 or 50 years due to the armed conflict there. They were extremely affected. Exactly. In that territory there. And and finally, I think the curator even suggested I should do it on the plant, do it on the master plant. She said. I said, Who am I to? There’s so many people who really know what they’re talking about when it comes to ayahuasca. S o I thought I can embed it in a larger discussion on this on the topic that was really central to the university project, which is how we bring together indigenous thinking with some western modern science and how we can bring them into a dialogue that is really fertile and could even be a model for an indigenous university.
That was the main question that I wanted to address in the film. And, I had plenty of material and conversations with the indigenous people about their cosmology, their way of relating to the land and of speaking on their memory of the land, which is extremely important because the Colombian government doesn’t really recognize their being in this territory is a way of saying it’s our land.
LK:
Aside from its engagement with Indigenous cosmologies and rituals, what’s perhaps most notable about Forest Mind is Ursula’s efforts to draw on Western techniques of DNA sequencing to visualize the generative power of the forest, in fact to use DNA as a storage medium to preserve the forest’s precarious diversity. Here’s how Ursula explains some of the vibrating graphics we see in the film in her own voice over. Buckle up, though: this isn’t high school physics:
Ursula Biemann [in Forest Mind]:
This image is a composite of a photograph, a sound recording, and a living seed from this tropical forest. The sound and image files were written in the binary code of zero one and were first translated into the DNA language of a CGT and then added to the DNA sequence of the living seed. This is how the living forest and its sonic and pictorial representation were written into one of the same genetic code, effectively collapsing the distinction between life and its representation. The image is produced on the surface of the sequencer in four colors, one for each. The image has 419,460 pixels corresponding to 519,460 DNA strands. Biodiversity and technology have co-evolved over millennia. There has always been a desire to make the intelligence of the rainforest preservable and retrievable to access this vegetal intelligence. Indigenous medics and molecular biologists have developed their distinct methodologies, biologists by studying and computing indigenous medics through visions.
LK:
If I understand this right, then what happens here is this: the images of DNA you see in Forest Mind aren’t mere images of other images representing what at heart makes the forest tick, its myriad of interactions and entanglements. No, what you see at work, is Western science embracing what indigenous cosmologies have known all along: biodiversity is just another name for body and mind, representation and materiality, life and information, image and reality folded into one. Here’s how Ursula described her conversations with scientists in Zurich:
UB:
They use DNA as an information technology. And working with this professor there, he suggested that I bring some materials from the rainforest, which I did: an enormous tree seed. And of course my video material and sound material, and we sequenced, we encoded this material all together into one strand of DNA. So we put together biological material with digital representation. And I thought that was really stunning. To collapse these two forms of being. And so what they do is they create these DNA codes. It’s a perishable product. And what ETH has discovered is to embed this DNA in glass pearls so that it would remain imperishable. And this information could then be stored for the future generation for eternity, in fact.
LK:
The pearls posed a fundamental problem, however: they were simply too small to be exhibited effectively. So, Ursula turned to her collaborators in Zurich to find another solution. She asked them to apply the same DNA sequencing process to generate multi-colored images—images that were then incorporated into the film as somewhat hallucinatory circles of color layered over the landscape of the Amazon.
These DNA images are of course undeniably digital. They are computational, a product of human technology. And yet—and this is crucial—as the result of DNA sequencing that also literally embody the forest itself. They are, in fact, its product; what makes it tick. They simultaneously represent and incorporate the forest’s physical composition, its genetic material, and yes: its mind. In doing so, they visualize what indigenous ayahuasca users consistently report when ingesting the plant. They dissolve the boundary between reality and vision, they describe a state where body and mind become one. Here, humans can perceive and sense their own existence as if they were trees—they become and think, quite literally, like forests.
Epilogue
With their diverse webs of life, their complex dependencies and interactions, their many alphabets, languages, texts, and intelligences—forests often appear wondrous even to western trained scientists who study them. They are
MJ:
a magical thing
LK:
as Vanderbilt biologist and environmental ecologist Malu Jorge told us at the beginning of this program. You don’t need to be a romantic, a dreamer, or a tree-hugger to recognize the profound power of forests. They are engines of life. And they are therefore engines of time itself, of what this podcast considers generative interference—that vibrant entanglement of human and nonhuman entities, the coexistence and collaboration of different rhythms, different stories, different voices and narratives.
Early in Ursula Biemann’s Forest Mind, we are invited to listen to the voice of Taita Carlos Jacanamejoy. During an ayahuasca ceremony, the forest’s medicinal plants dramatically expanded his way of knowing the world around him. He experienced the forest not as a static thing, but as a living intelligence, a conscious presence that communicates across multiple dimensions.
[voiceover translation from Forest Mind]
“I came back to Earth and I was the only human on Earth. There were no other living beings on Earth. Only forest, forest, forest. Virgin forest, without pollution. The air you breathe is clean, your lungs are completely clean. Protected, totally pure. The trees move. They talk. They are alive.”
LK:
There is nothing trite or trivial about considering trees and forests as animate beings, as wild clocks if you wish. On the contrary. Over the last decade, Ursula Biemann’s work has done something quite significant: it has explored the many lives and times of the forest by building bridges—real bridges—between indigenous and Western approaches to understanding diversity. Diversity as a model of coexistence. As sustainability. And just as importantly, diversity as something that carries spiritual and political weight, not just physical.
One of Ursula’s key insights is this: forests are social. They’re populated by multiple kinds of selves and subjects. And for Biemann, art—perhaps not entirely unlike ayahuasca ceremonies—possesses a unique potential. It can listen. It can tap into the forest’s many voices, recognize its diverse temporalities and beings. And in doing so, it can make a powerful political argument as well: nonhuman entities deserve legal standing and rights. They shouldn’t exist merely as mute objects of study or extraction.
In November 2025, COP 30, the world climate summit, was held in Belem, Brazil—close to some of the most biodiverse forests on the planet. The United States was unfortunately absent as the current administration officially dismisses climate change as a hoax and views ecological diversity as an obstacle to economic and political dominance. Despite this, however, COP 30 launched something ambitious: the Tropical Forest Forever Facility Fund—$125 billion dedicated to global forest conservation. The main target is to incentivize different countries not to deforest. The plan sounds promising, and yet it’s hard to overlook its challenges. We’ve seen this model before. In 2007, Ecuador made a famous proposal—asking wealthy Western nations to pay billions to preserve the Yasuní National Park instead of drilling for oil. It didn’t happen. What we also need to consider is that the biggest threat to biodiverse forests today isn’t just deforestation—it’s fire. Wildfires, as we call them, though there’s little that’s wild about them. Most are a direct response to human intervention.
Biemann’s work wasn’t shown in Belem. I wish it had been. This work is conceptually demanding. It’s rigorous. Cerebral and taxing, some critics may say. Along with its unbending sense of curiosity, its embrace of epistemic diversity, its eagerness to listen to unheard voices—for me the most remarkable feature of Biemann’s work is its insistence on the power of generosity, its redefinition of power as generosity. Taking her cue from the abundant collaboration of biodiverse forests, she practices what she explores. All her work is freely available on her website: geobodies.org.
Will this work stop wildfires and deforestation tomorrow? No. But it does something important nevertheless: it creates much-needed space for reflection. A space to rethink our relations with the nonhuman world. A space to imagine nonextractive approaches to planetary life and understand the need to redirect more of our wealth toward preserving the wealth of our biodiverse planet.
Let me encourage you to visit her site. Get lost in her forest only to find the unexpected. See what emerges when we listen closely—and generously—to the forest’s many voices.