Forest Media

Forest Media

Forest media names creative practices that emerge from living forests and from Indigenous epistemologies under conditions of a war on forests. It asks what media can do when forests are treated as co‑creators of forest futures. Forest media refers to media practices that grow out of ongoing relations with forests and remain accountable to those relations. It is grounded in embodied listening to living forests and those who defend them, through film, sonic cartographies, storytelling, and other practices that intervene in how forests and territories are perceived, inhabited, and defended as living worlds.

Forest media is part of a wider grammar of forest futurities: a way of thinking, feeling, and composing with forests that is embodied in relations and oriented toward conjuring collective resurgence. Listening emerges here as a radical form of resistance and a decolonising poetics, opening onto the future potential of the unformed and challenging visitors to consider how forest futures can be made in the present.

In contrast to an extractive gaze that renders forests as empty, external, and extractable, forest media foregrounds forests as living relational worlds shaped through intergenerational cultivation, language, and struggle. These practices bring into view “forests within forests”: regenerating rastrojos, ancestral stories, invisible beings, and insurgent life‑forms that persist in territories marked as degraded, marginal, or post‑conflict.

War on forests and forest militarization

Forest media takes shape in the midst of a war on forests: not only the clearing of trees, but the erosion of life‑generating connectivities, languages, and epistemologies through which forests and communities co‑constitute one another. In Colombia, expanding frontiers of coca, cattle, oil, and conservation continue to push into forest territories, while Indigenous and forest defenders are killed and displaced.

This war on forests is inseparable from forest militarization: counterinsurgency and War on Drugs operations that frame forests as insurgent spaces to be occupied, fumigated, and pacified. Across colonial conquest, Cold War counterinsurgency, and the contemporary War on Drugs, forests have been repeatedly cast as hostile jungles and “empty” frontiers, legitimating defoliation campaigns and other interventions that open territories to extractive projects and sever forests from the relations that sustain them.

Through this extractive gaze, forests are transformed into governable objects and commodified resources, detached from the relational lifeworlds and Indigenous epistemologies that compose them. The war on forests is thus more than deforestation; it is an assault on the life‑generating relations, languages, and forms of transmission from which forests grow and through which forest futures are imagined and defended. Forest media works to undo this, decolonising “the forest” as a concept and as a regime of seeing.

Practices of forest futurities

Across different sites and collectives, forest media is grounded in three interwoven practices that respond directly to the war on forests and help articulate a grammar of forest futurities.

• Repairing relations
  Treating filmmaking, sound work, and ritual not simply as representation, but as ways of repairing life‑generating connectivities between communities and forest territories. Rather than only documenting damage, these practices are undertaken with chagras, rivers, and ceremonial spaces in ways that actively re‑weave relations.

• Reclaiming languages and epistemologies
  Centering Indigenous languages, ceremonial grammars, and oral histories, and affirming that languages themselves encode forest relations and more‑than‑human knowledges. Forest media here is bound up with a poetics of resurgence, asking how words, images, and sounds can return life to forests and to the relations that have been ruptured.Van-Dexter_PhD-Dissertation-2022.docx+1

• Fostering intergenerational transmission
  Creating protected spaces where elders, youth, and forests can learn together despite displacement, violence, militarisation, and schooling systems that sever people from forest territories. Camera work, editing, sound, and shared screenings become occasions for intergenerational learning and for transmitting forest epistemologies that orient life’s ongoingness.

Taken together, these practices form a powerful counter‑narrative to the extractive gaze and position forests as co‑creators in the making of images, sounds, and claims on forest futures. They participate in composing new lexicons and grammars of convivir with forests—languages of emergence that grow from destruction toward resurgent futures.

Forest media in practice

Forest media takes concrete shape in Indigenous audiovisual and sonic practices in the Colombian Amazon and other forest frontiers, where film, sound, and mapping are taken up as tools for forest defense, language resurgence, and intergenerational learning. Indigenous communication collectives reclaim cameras, editing, and public screenings from their histories in colonial documentation and reorient them within ceremonial, territorial, and pedagogical contexts grounded in their own epistemologies.

In Murui‑Muina territories, for example, traveling media processes work with youth and elders to film coca and the chagra as consecrated origins of the Word, treating cultivation and ceremony as sites of epistemological transmission rather than scenes of resource extraction. Along Amazonian rivers, filmmakers experiment with extended shots and carefully composed soundscapes that allow water and forest to organise a film’s pacing and structure, inviting viewers to listen to rivers and mountains as co‑protagonists rather than as scenery. In Cofán territories, audiovisual and musical practices in A’ïngae turn technical training and local screenings into spaces for cultural strengthening and intergenerational transmission, reframing cameras as instruments oriented toward epistemological resurgence.

These and related efforts indicate the kinds of practices named by forest media while respecting that decisions about access, screening, and circulation remain with the collectives and communities who create them. Forest media learns with these practices rather than appropriating them, holding space for forest‑attuned media without placing films themselves into open circulation.

Forest media as listening method

Forest media also functions as a methodological framework for rethinking media and environmental humanities from within forests themselves, rather than about them at a distance. It asks what it means to practice media research under conditions of ecological crisis and forest militarisation, and how forests, as living territories, can become both objects and co‑authors of visual and sonic cultures.

Listening is central to this framework. Listening is treated as both research method and ethical relation: a way of tracing dynamic, porous relations among environments, images, soundscapes, monuments, and militarised landscapes, and of attuning to Indigenous and community epistemologies often marginalised in official archives. Listening to decay, decomposition, fungi, roots, and the rhythmic comings and goings of pollinators means treating forests as living languages of collective emergence, where death nourishing life becomes a grammar for thinking otherwise.

Through close attention to soundscapes, silences, temporalities, and living languages, forest media examines how forests are registered, ignored, or amplified in visual and auditory media, and how these choices enact or refuse an extractive, militarised gaze. Listening, in this sense, becomes a way of decolonising “the forest” as a category—loosening inherited visual grammars and learning from forest sound‑worlds and Indigenous sonic practices how to rearticulate relations, responsibilities, and futures.

This work feeds into a broader grammar of forest futurities: languages, images, and sounds that emerge from embodied encounters with forests and that seek to repair and reclaim relations ruptured by colonial language. Forest media is thus both creative practice and decolonising method, oriented toward the collective emergence of resurgent forest futures.