Music for Trees – Berlin

6 October 2018

Photo credit: Lars Wohlnick

THROUGH A FOREST WILDERNESS

Aktionen im Wald. Performance, Konzeptkunst, Events
Actions in the Forest. Performance, Conceptual Art, Events
1960 – ∞

Exhibition in the forest
Berlin | Nikolskoer Landpartie | 6–28 October 2018

Music for Trees

Music for Trees aims to inspire an exchange of energetic imagination between humans and trees. Participants are encouraged to move around the trees in stillness. By “performing” to a tree, the human participant listens to the tree listening back to her. A connection is formed, allowing for a potential transcendental experience.

Music for Trees was originally created in 2010 for an environmental art project by Suzanne Husky. At the time, I was researching binaural brainwave entrainment, plant bioacoustics, as well as military, medical, and alternative healing literature on the effects of infra- to very high-frequencies on the human body.

I came across the Cyma1000, a device used for sound therapy that can play up to five-pitch clusters (or chords) to assist resonance-based “massage” therapy. In Music for Trees, selected Cyma therapy drones are used as the initial musical material, with presets such as alpha state, ecstasy, love, and sonic tissue repair—but restricted to frequency ranges for which plants show sensitivity.

The frequency clusters are divided into independent audio channels and played over independent portable loudspeakers. As participants move through the forest, the drone becomes spatialised. Participants thus actively contribute to the spatial and telepathic dimensions of the piece.

Curatorial Text

Petra Stegmann

“The clearest way into the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”
— John Muir, 1890

Seventy years before artists around the world began to discover the forest as a creative space, John Muir articulated a perspective that would later resonate deeply with artistic practice. From the 1960s onward, the relationship between art and nature entered a new phase—one that included performance and action art.

Where earlier generations of artists focused on the representation of nature, contemporary artists began engaging with it in an intensive, existential, and physical manner. The forest was no longer a site of romantic glorification or pictorial study, but an environment experienced through the body and involved as a partner in the artistic process.

Projected over several years, Through a Forest Wilderness is the first exhibition to focus on this existential dialogue between artists and the forest or trees. It presents historical works of performance and happening, Fluxus, body art, and conceptual art alongside contemporary works by younger artists.

Deliberately foregoing the gallery space, the exhibition took place directly in the forest. Trees functioned as carriers of materials and objects, hosting reconstructions of historical works, photographic documentation of forest-based artistic activities from 1960 onwards, contemporary interventions, participatory instructions, performances, screenings, tours, discussions, and workshops.

The exhibition aimed to explore nature as a space for art—inviting visitors off the well-trodden path and into encounters that echo the experiences of the artists themselves: quiet, embodied, and attentive.

musicfortrees
spatialaudio
telepathy
plants
healing
performance
meditation
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