Signs of Life and Death

30 KM south of Stockholm, ancient farm lands have been formed by old seabeds that rose from the Baltic Sea after the last Ice-age. The region supports a rich ecology of life including song birds and large birds of prey, moose, deer, hares, foxes, beavers etc. as well as a growing population of wild boar which is rampant across Sweden. Nestled among the lakes which dot the coast, there is a 11 hectare property composed of hills, ancient pasture, and forest, which has recently come into our tenure. The clay-rich grounds are fed by a running stream which has been collected into springs hidden among stone circles and stone walls scattered throughout the forest.

Enclosed in this property, is a protected species of black fungi from the Sarcodon family, Fjällig Taggsvamp. Consequently, the national forestry agency, Skogsstyrelsen, has designated the forest as a nyckelbiotop (key biotope) and forbidden forestry projects. However, this has resulted in the forest falling into decay. It is blighted by the common European bark beetle which has swarmed through the forest devouring everything in its way. The forest’s susceptibility to the bark beetle is a direct result of a monoculture of spruce trees which have been planted all over Sweden, and are subsequently vulnerable to pests. Petrified and decapitated trunks are littered across the landscape, white as bone. Their trunks collapse into the canopy where they are supported by the creaking arms of others, if not fallen among rotting trees that blanket the forest floor, stifling all other life.

We are committed to accelerating the cycle of death which paralyses the forest, in order to facilitate the recovery of its ecology. This will involve a concerted effort to remove diseased trees, and to clear the forest floor with the help of sheep and pigs who may be employed to remove debris and resurrect ancient pastures. Additionally, bees will be introduced to regenerate the biodiversity of the forest. This work coincides with my ongoing research into semiosis, which is concerned with how systems become animate and productive of signs capable of expressing beyond-human agency understood as the incarnate ecology of the forest.

My research views living ecologies as a web of prophetic relations, expressed as lucky signs which map space-time and signify ecological relations across species and temporality. I am interested in regenerative forestry as a semiotic practice concerned with the creation and transformation of signs which become animate. This view of semiosis is observed most clearly in art practice; as such my research interests originated in my study of animist ritual mediated through my own practice of the Afro-Brazilian and indigenous Brazilian ritual Capoeira Angola, which produced the research project Lucky Rituals: philosophical animism and semiosis. My research thereby acknowledges beyond-human forms of semiosis, as well as beyond-human teachers capable of informing the anthropocentric conception of signification, personified in this instance, as the inhabitants of the forest making and responding to signs.