Bos Wakker (wake up forest)

Public series co-curate with Lam Lai

The visual lyricism of the series Bos Wakker is rooted in the contemporary sonic experience in the woods. Its activity as an event is not limited to performative acts or installations related to the forest, but also as a mediator connecting media art to the residents of The Hague. Working in an open space, artists develop new representations of collective experiences for the audience from analyzing the interrelation of mankind and the urbanized natural environment.

Background

Curator Wen Chin Fu has developed a new sonic language in contemporary art that responds to digital culture and the urban environment. Her diverse activities include performance art, interactive installation, and many sonic instrument-making projects. In the past several years, she has been researching different aspects of sonic experience in natural environments, and the relationship between mankind and nature. In 2015, she worked with French action poet Marguerite Bobey in a project in one of the forests in France, exploring the empathetic relationship between culture and nature using actions, sounds and words. During the artist-residency of Nida Art Colony in 2017, she intensively modified her augmented ear tube project, which is a wearable installation that connects bendable tubes to our ears. This instrument creates interesting distortions of sonic experience, especially in outdoor conditions where people can walk around with it. Besides creating her art projects, she also organises different events and concerts, such as Kunstroute in Scheveningen, various concert series at Villa K, and TedxAmsterdam ED opening and closing performances.

Since 2018, she started to investigate the diversity of sonic artworks in public spaces around The Hague. She discovered one of the most interesting sonic experiences was in the forests of The Hague. The urbanised forests represent both the celebration of their long history and as a symbol of the collective memory and everyday life of The Hague residents. By questioning how much nature do we need, Wen Chin Fu analyses the importance of nature to urban residents via exploring the current relationship between humans and nature, reflecting the influence of digital culture on mankind, and the variety of collective experiences of the audience. In this project, she invited artist and composer Lam Lai to join in as a co-curator. Lam Lai was involved in various interdisciplinary projects, music-theater projects and festivals in Europe and Asia. She develops different site-specific projects which demonstrate the ambiguity between public and private spaces in the reality, and its influences on the art experience. Wen Chin Fu and Lam Lai would like to invite different artists to respond to the topic and present their works to The Hague residents.

Bos Wakker #1 Forest Phantoms by Barbara Ellison supported by Rewire festival
Date: 05-04-2020 15:30 - 18:30
More info :

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