Visual Strolls
seasonal residency
Visual Strolls is a residency space for artists who share an affinity for landscapes and wilderness, inner and outer. Foresta is changing with every season as the real forest does. In cyclical circularity it celebrates changing seasons of nature and of our lives. As snow melts away, as days grow longer, as leaves change colour, as they fly with the wind, as stillness settles in, as warmth returns, as birds cross continents — at the turn of each seasonal moment we invite a different artist to bring a new time of the year to Foresta by creating a portrait of time that later becomes part of the permanent Museum of Seasons.
Winter mini-seasons
In winter ‘Visual Strolls’ at Foresta becomes a space alive with diverse encounters. In the spirit of the entangled pluriversal visions, we invite artists to share seasonal moments they observe and experience across geographies. We are also inspired by the Japanese culture where the understanding of seasons stretches beyond the four times of the year with varying temperature and length of daylight: there are 72 micro-seasons, 72 kō, 72 poetic moments of the year closely observed as things change in the living world around. This winter at Foresta 2 artists from different parts of the globe are sharing their visions of the season.
Winter 2024 Artist in Residence
Jihyun Kim
Jihyun is an illustrator and a picture book author based in Seoul. She works in various design fields but mostly likes to tell life stories that we can all relate to. She does so by remembering her own experience as a child, a young adult, a woman and now a mother of a baby girl.
Winter 2024 Portrait: Side by Side
“언젠가 나는 숲에서 길을 잃었다. 매서운 바람에 한 포기 풀처럼 속절없이 흔들리다 겁먹은 동물처럼 웅크렸다. 수풀을 헤치며 한참을 헤매 도착한 곳이 내가 떠나온 자리였고, 나는 그 자리에 주저앉아 돌이 되었다.
그러던 어느날, 작은 동물 한 마리가 폴짝폴짝 내 앞을 지나갔다. 조그만 발로 열심히도 뛰어가는 모습을 보고 나도 일어나 같이 걸었다. 그 작은 동물은 나와 나란히 걸어주었다.”
“I was once lost in a forest. I stumbled like a rootless plant as wind blew through me. I crouched like a scared rodent before I got back up and roamed through the thick green only to arrive back at where I had begun. It was then I dropped and decided to be a stone.
One day, a little creature skipped past me. The tiny but ever so diligent strides somehow invited me to be back on my feet again. It let me catch up with it and so we went on.”
About Visual Strolls
Visual Strolls is not only an online gallery, an exhibition room, a portrait into the work of the invited artist. It is also a part of our long-term research, understanding arts and creativity as forces that change human states of attention in manifold ways, as forms of cognition and perception, divergent perspectives and poetry of vision, access to intuition and imagination, and empowerment for conscious creation of culture. You can read more about Art into Life research here.
Cover image: Jihyun Kim