The book Forest Encounters is a culmination of a three-year European cooperation project, which engaged scientists, humanists, artists, local communities, and non-human “participants” in a number of events, conferences, exhibitions and gatherings. Published by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory and Archive Books in 2026, it is edited by art historian Urška Jurman and philosopher Mateja Kurir, and is also available online. Besides Jurman and Kurir, the Forest Encounters team included Polonca Lovšin, Nayarí Castillo and Dušica Dražić, who all work within the intersections of art, research, activism, and knowledge production. The book dives into a wide range of cultural aspects of forests and encompasses interviews and a diverse set of contributions from the arts and humanities, and people working in close relationship with forests. It serves as an invitation to reconnect with forests, become more familiar with them, and reculturalise them.
In the interview, we speak with Mateja Kurir, who reflects on the growing aesthetic and social significance of forests.
The practitioners and artists you chose share a strong, intimate relationship with the forest. Through immersion rather than observation, they approached ecological thinking from a more embodied, nuanced angle. What have you learned about forests and people, and what did you focus on in your curatorial and editorial work?
This book shows that there are many ways of approaching and understanding the forest, which has become one of the key spaces through which the environmental crisis is experienced and negotiated today. Our relationship with the forest is deeply ambivalent, shaped not only by ecological concerns but also by spatial experience, cultural practices, and forms of inhabitation specific to the present moment, while still carrying the uncanny traces of the past. The forest remains difficult to fully grasp, not least because it functions simultaneously as a material environment and as a powerful symbolic space. By bringing together art historias, landscape architects, forestrers, wild life researchers, philosophers and anthropologists, and artists, the book opens a broad field of perspectives. Rather than proposing a dominant discourse, it allows diverse voices to coexist, approaching the forest as a spatial condition that resists reduction to any single mode of thinking.
In the time of the so-called Anthropocene, we are witnessing an unprecedented environmental rupture, one that has also profoundly reshaped the conditions of aesthetic experience. What emerges is a specific contemporary aesthetics, one that has developed its own version of the sublime and, alongside it, a renewed presence of the uncanny.
The book Forest Encounters thus offers a collective reflection on the diverse meanings, challenges, and perspectives related to the forest. Through artistic research projects, essays, interviews, poems, and short stories, it aims to contribute to imagining and shaping a future of and for the forest that is more inclusive and grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration.
In your essay, Forest-Thinking: From the Feared and Forgotten to the Sublime, you reevaluate the philosophical concepts ascribed to forests and reposition them in contemporary discourse. Can you explain what contributes to the revived interest in forests from a philosophical perspective?
The forest has recently become a site of renewed interest, not only in philosophy and the humanities, but also in art and aesthetic theory. There are many reasons for this return, and I would argue that it is closely tied to the constraints and tensions of our present moment. In the time of the so-called Anthropocene, we are witnessing an unprecedented environmental rupture, one that has also profoundly reshaped the conditions of aesthetic experience. What emerges is a specific contemporary aesthetics, one that has developed its own version of the sublime and, alongside it, a renewed presence of the uncanny. This is not the uncanny as a psychoanalytical or metaphysical category, as we find it in Heidegger or Freud, but rather as an affect embedded in everyday life and in our concrete encounters with natural and seminatural environments.
“As Eva Horn suggests, forests have become ambiguous spaces, suspended between the natural and the artificial, too vast and entangled to be fully grasped. The forest emerges as one of the key contemporary sites where aesthetic experience is negotiated.”
As Eva Horn suggests, forests, oil fields, supermarkets, and data centres have become ambiguous spaces, suspended between the natural and the artificial. They are too close and too familiar to be observed from a distance, yet at the same time too vast, entangled, and infrastructural to be fully grasped. This proximity fundamentally reshapes our aesthetic relation to what we once understood as nature. In this context, the forest emerges as one of the key contemporary sites where aesthetic experience is negotiated. It can be understood as a spatialization of the sublime, not in the sense of the 18th century or Kantian philosophy, but as a form specific to our present condition. At the same time, precisely because of our growing distance from nature, there is a renewed desire to return to it and to remystify the forest as a space of reflection and grounding.
Within this altered landscape, we are dealing with a version of the sublime in which its traditionally terrifying aspects remain very much present. Much like in the 18th century, when the sublime was a central concept, it still appears capable of opening a path toward transcendence while leaving room for discomfort. It is perhaps for this reason that the sublime has so often been understood as the reverse side of the uncanny.
We have fewer and fewer chances for a forest encounter. Through the destruction of natural environments and the extraction of their resources, we produce forest ruins, while their ecological, social and psychological values remain secondary to their economic ones. By losing contact with forests, we are robbed of a crucial sense of otherness and survival experience that the city cannot offer.
I often think that we are privileged to live in Slovenia, where most of the country is covered by forests, where animals, including large carnivores such as the brown bear, still inhabit these landscapes, and where access to the forest is guaranteed to everyone by law. Encounters with the forest here can sometimes be understood as encounters with what we call nature, but they are also much more than that. The forest does not serve only ecological, social, or economic functions; it also offers a particular sense of calm in contrast to the contemporary overproduction and constant acceleration we are facing.
“In many ways, the forest in Slovenia is one of the most popular public spaces, and as such functions as a spatial manifestation of the social welfare state, yet at the same time, it is a site of strong social antagonisms.”
In many ways, the forest in Slovenia is one of the most popular public spaces, and as such functions as a spatial manifestation of the social welfare state, yet at the same time, it is a site of strong social antagonisms. These tensions have long been, and continue to be, reflected in the ways forests are inhabited, used, and managed, not just in Slovenia, but also in other countries. A particularly striking example is the portrayal of migrants, who often live in forests while travelling from the Balkans to Western Europe, as savages within right-wing political agendas. Another example can be seen in the growing number of demonstrations by different social groups mobilising to protect specific forest areas across Central Europe. In recent years, the importance of the forest, together with the narratives and practices connected to it, has been growing rapidly, and I would argue that it is gaining a more central role within society.
Interestingly, this is not limited to Slovenia or Central Europe. Across the European Union, forested areas are expanding as a result of broader social changes, and the role of urban forests is increasing. To return to your question, yes, I agree that one cannot feel or think in the same way within the city, a space of contradictions and conflicts par excellence, as one can in the forest.
What political charge is embedded in forests?
With the growing recognition of the forests for people’s quality of life and their central role within the environmental crisis, I would argue that the social and recreational dimensions of the forest are becoming even more significant. The forest can be understood as a form of public space, although the extent to which it can be used as such varies from state to state.
“Because the forest fulfils a variety of functions and brings together different, often competing interests, including its role as a public space, it frequently becomes a site of tension.”
In the book, several artists and contributors challenge this understanding of the forest by approaching it as a space of conflict. Because the forest fulfils a variety of functions and brings together different, often competing interests, including its role as a public space, it frequently becomes a site of tension.
Anthropologist Agata A. Konczal writes about forest disturbances in Central and Eastern Europe caused by windstorms and bark beetle outbreaks, as well as the social narratives these events have generated. She discusses different struggles over forests, such as those in the Tatra and Carpathian Mountains and in the Białowieża Forest, where forests have “become places of heated conflicts about forest protection” (p. 16).
The book also presents four artistic research projects by Polonca Lovšin, Dušica Dražić, Nayarí Castillo, and Marjolijn Dijkman, which can be understood as questioning the notion of the forest as a public space. Dušica Dražić focuses on reforestation on the Pešter Plateau in Serbia, exploring the forest and art as sites of collective labour. Marjolijn Dijkman engages with the Verdun forest, a site of major battles during the First World War, and addresses in her artworks the forest as a direct site of historical conflict. Nayarí Castillo focuses on human and more-than-human encounters in the context of forests in and around Graz. In her series of collages, Polonca Lovšin explores the transformative power of mushrooms, as well as the often overlooked relationship between women and the forest.
What do you think has changed in our understanding of forests in the 50 years since Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous The Word for World Is Forest?
I find the title of this book, condensed in this statement, particularly relevant today. Given how much of the natural environment, including forests, has been destroyed by our civilisation over the past fifty years, I would argue that this statement is even more relevant now than it was in the 1970s.
Can you please choose a couple of your favourite quotes from the book, the ones you find most significant?
One of the aims of the book is to widen the narratives and discourses about and on the forest by bringing together different disciplines and ways of thinking. We were interested in the forest not as a single topic or object, but as a space that is approached, imagined, and narrated very differently across philosophy, art, and the social and natural sciences.
In this sense, the quote from the interview with art historian and critic T. J. Demos is particularly important for me. When he says that “art has the power to play a transformative role in how we understand and respond to the environmental crisis” (p. 31), he captures quite precisely what we wanted to do with the artistic works included in the book. These works are not meant as illustrations of ecological problems, nor as solutions to them. Rather, they open up other ways of seeing, and thinking about the forest, allowing different scenarios and realities of our contemporary condition to appear and to remain open over time.
Another perspective is offered in the essay by art historian and art critic Giovanni Aloi, which addresses another key concern of the book, namely the analysis of dominant narratives about the forest in the humanities. As he writes, “During the Romantic period, the sublime in art reinforced a further figurative separation between humans and forests, portraying the forest as an ancient and remote environment from which we are implicitly and ultimately excluded” (p. 114). This observation is important for understanding how deeply rooted some of our ways of imagining the forest still are.
One of the aims of the book is also to present the different meanings and tensions related to the forest in contemporary times. Professor and landscape architect Ana Kučan writes about the forest as a complex element of the cultural landscape, shaped through its representations in literature, art, and landscape design. As she notes, “The historical symbolism of the garden – as a manifestation of humanised nature and human order-, to which the forest stands as a counterpart, continues to dominate and shape contemporary discourse” (p. 90).
To show the diversity of voices brought together in the book, I would like to conclude with a quote from an interview with wildlife researcher Miha Krofel. Speaking about coexistence with wild animals, he connects ecological questions directly to social relations and conflicts: “In this context, it is not only tolerance towards wild animals, but often even more important is tolerance between different segments of our own society. The topic of coexistence, especially with wolves, is a major source of conflict among various stakeholders in Europe today, and public opinion is very polarised” (p. 162).
