Listening to Forests Lab
Listening to Forests Lab is a practice-based lab on listening, sound, and communication in forest territories marked by colonization, deforestation, and war. It begins from embodied listening in the forest—attending to decay and decomposition, the generative relations of fungi and roots, and the rhythmic comings and goings of pollinators—to explore how listening can transform our relations with forests and orient our collective futures. The Lab works with Indigenous and campesino communities and forest defenders to develop creative methods that emerge from forests themselves rather than looking at them from a distance.
Relational Listening
Relational listening is the core method of the Lab. It treats forests as living relations and living languages, where decomposition, germination, and interspecies entanglement are forms of speech and memory. Listening closely to the language of the forest—the earthy redolence of decay, the thresholds where death nourishes life, the dense entanglements of roots and mycelia—opens onto grammars of forest futurities.
For centuries, colonial language has inscribed itself onto forests, disrupting the embodied relations and Indigenous epistemologies that compose their diverse life‑worlds. This rending of relations is directly connected to the ecocidal destruction we face today. Relational listening is a form of resistance to this ongoing war on forests: a way of tuning into traces of lost futures and reconnecting with the life‑generating relations that have been ruptured.
Through relational listening to and learning from forests, Listening to Forests Lab:
Repairs relations between communities and forests that have been ruptured through ongoing colonization, deforestation, and conflict.
Reclaims languages and ceremonial grammars through which intergenerational learning occurs, including learning from the forest itself.
Fosters intergenerational transmission by creating spaces where elders, youth, and forests can learn together, keeping open the pathways along which forest knowledge and futures move.
Through these practices, listening becomes a decolonizing poetics and a radical form of resistance, opening the conditions for resurgent forest futures.
Current Focus
The Lab is currently grounded in forest territories in Putumayo and Caquetá, Colombia, where deforestation, coca cultivation, cattle ranching, and militarization intersect with long histories of Indigenous and campesino forest defense. In these territories, forests are understood as living relational entanglements of diverse life-worlds formed over generations. Listening to Forests Lab works alongside local communities and forest defenders to explore how this notion of relationality can orient responses to destruction toward resurgent forest futures.
Methods & Formats
Listening to Forests Lab develops methods of relational listening with forests and those who defend them through:
Workshops and field-based labs that combine listening walks, sound recording, story circles, and mapping in forest territories.
Residencies that bring together artists, writers, forest defenders, and researchers to co-create soundscapes, films, and poetic works with forests.
Immersive installations and listening sessions that invite participants into shared spaces of forest listening, often combining sound, text, moving image, and simple ritual forms.
Poetic and cinematic experiments—forest futurist films, forest-based poetry, and scores for listening—that emerge from these encounters.
Across these formats, the Lab treats forests as collaborators in the making of images, sounds, and languages.
Past & Ongoing Work
Listening to Forests Lab emerges from over a decade of collaborative work in tropical forests. Recent and ongoing threads include:
Listening walks, story circles, and small-scale listening labs with Indigenous and campesino forest defenders.
Experimental “forests within forests” sound and film studies that translate listening-based fieldwork into audio-visual and spatial forms.
Forest Fugues, a radio feature that listens to Colombia’s tropical forests and those who defend them through listening-based poetic and sonic compositions that gather forest voices, temporalities, and soundscapes into fugue-like structures.
These activities form the groundwork for current and future residencies, installations, and public listening events.