Forest Encounters explores and presents diverse imaginaries, concepts, and practices around the following questions: What can we learn from and through the forest? What are the actual and potential human encounters with the forest? How can we coexist more harmoniously with the forest?

Bringing together the disciplines of art, forestry, and the humanities, Forest Encounters views the forest not only as a site to explore ecology, but also as a space of diverse and often conflicting policies, as well as social, cultural, and economic practices.

The growing urgency of the environmental and climate crisis compels us to reconsider our relationship with forests. Forest Encounters acknowledges both human and other-than-human perspectives, recognising the rights of humans to nature as well as the rights of nature itself. Through artistic research projects, workshops, storytelling, symposia, publications, and exhibitions, it seeks to contribute to a more inclusive and nature-aligned future.

Artists in the exhibition: Nayari Castillo, Marjolijn Dijkman, Dušica Dražić with collaborators, Reni Hofmüller, Polonca Lovšin

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The exhibition is part of the Forest Encounters project (2023-2025), co-funded by the European Union (CREA) and Flanders – State of the Art. Partner organisations: Association Igor Zabel for Culture and Theory (Slovenia), Graz University of Technology – Faculty of Architecture, Institute of Spatial Design (Austria), Out of Sight (Belgium).

OUT OF SIGHT was founded in 2018 by artists Dušica Dražić and Wim Janssen, imagined to be a shared kitchen table where a meal is served, and conversations emerge. The concerns of the day are discussed, and guests invited to the kitchen table are introduced to the internal world of the house. The dynamism and encounter created around the kitchen table is what they look for.

The program is build around international cooperations among artists, curators, researchers and the public at large. They strive for a critical and flexible approach, with the objective to support a development and experimentation in arts that is outside the logic of consumption and markets.

OUT OF SIGHT aims to find a potential hidden within what is often perceived as different, marginal or even unwanted. They make room for the ephemeral and the ambiguous. It is a space where the poetic and the political meet.