FOREST_SOCIETY consists on an extensive research on and through sound; an investigation of its meaning, and its use as form of communication, statement and witness of existence;

a very personal, non-linear investigation about acoustic community, home, homelessness.

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The city of Lisbon was taken here as a model even if, on the same time, the work aspires to escape the boundaries drawn by a specific geographical spot.

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The starting point was defined by audio-recorded conversations, that took place and were collected during a period of interaction with homeless people living in Lisbon streets in 2009.

       The society they belong to, from which they are often marginalized, is now considered here, metaphorically, poetically, and effectively (for similarities that can be traced between the two systems) as a Forest, in which People-Trees of different species and genealogies interact:

native and non-native plants (the non-native coming from different regions and continents) cohabiting.

Inside the Forest the development follows different lines and shapes.

 

Observing the paths of some of these People-Trees, the growth of their roots and branches, the movement of the leaves and the blooming of the flowers, it is possible to discover personal stories and experiences, introducing in this work ideas and thoughts of music, architecture, poetry, visual elements, literature… making up a collection of colors/sounds: the sounds of the Forest.

 

 

      The work approaches different questions, developing in various directions over the curse of its elaboration.

 

      Barry Truax mentions speech, music and soundscape as the three major systems involved in acoustic communication, a dialogue that applies for sound from a “human perspective”.(1)

 

      It is exactly this human perspective that inspires this research, together with the idea that the capacity to speak and produce sound has to interlace and be alternate with the capacity to listen:

                                    to a voice,

                                    to a signal,

                                    to a fundamental note.

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Listening as an active role, permitting an improvement in the quality of the communication; listening as an action that can be accomplished with many different degrees of attention.

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      I would like to emphasize the idea of sound as a process of communication, an organic ecosystem, unique, unrepeatable and dynamic, with pauses, deviations, transformations, managing to mediate and create relationships among all the parts involved (listener and speaker, people in a conversation, listener and environment); an interactive (as we are actively contributing to it) “huge musical concert running continuously” as R. Murray Schafer suggests.(2)

 

 

Some main issues attracted my curiosity:

 

 

1_From the need to come in contact with the reality of people living in the street, arose the complementary question about the kind of relationship, people living inside a house have with their own place. What arouses the sensation of “feeling home”? what is the need of a private space, of security? which memories and thoughts are connected with it?

 

 

2_Secured by the intimacy of a private space what relationship is developed with the public/external space?

 

      

3_How do people relate, interlace and develop with the Urban and the Natural environments?

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4_How do our senses recognize and define Home? How they perceive the spaces that surround us? If architecture provides a structure to shelter our daily activities, involving in this experience the senses of sight, touch and smell, through the choice and the organization of lines, volumes and materials, how then do these choices influence our feelings, and how concretely do they alter and influence our perception of sound? How we perceive the aural architecture of a space?

 

 

  

      All of these questions were translated into an eight month long investigation process that became the center of a new round of interviews with a varied group of citizens, giving voice to the Forest_Society.

 

 

      A further collection was made of sounds (the sounds of the forest), recorded on the street, in public gardens, on public transports and inside a cemetery (the last House).

 

 

     

      FOREST_SOCIETY, furthermore, assumes itself as a voice for freedom, the freedom of being and happening in respect of the self and the other, the free manifestation of individuality as part of an ecosystem that is desired without fences and discrimination, where sound could be thought of as a tool of encounter.

 

 

 

 

 

        Forest Society is an invitation to open our ears

                                and close our eyes...

                                         ...to listen...

 

            

                             ...to listen is to imagine!...

 

 

 

In addition to this Web Page, FOREST_SOCIETY embodies:

 

 

_FOREST_SOCIETY Dossier: a dossier explaining the process and the contents of this research. (See Forest_Society PDF in Menu)

 

_FOREST_SOCIETY Installation Project: an audio/visual experience where human voices (words, sentences) and natural/urban sounds are orchestrated, filling the space with different rhythms and intensities.

 

 

 

 

1 (Truax, 1984, p.xiv-xv)

 

2 (Environmental&Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter. R. Murray Schafer. I Have Never Seen a Sound by http://www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/Schafer06.htm)

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