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 the natural world 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, as apples ripen — at the turn of seasonal moments we invite different artists to bring a new time of the year to Foresta by making a seasonal 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. Drawing inspiration from 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 3 artists from different parts of the globe are sharing their visions of the season.
Winter Solstice Artists in Residence 2024
Dunjiva Kollektiv
Dunjiva Kollektiv is a wishful imaginative space with deep ties to places, plants and everything that makes up the world by its breathing. It was founded by artists Dunja Krcek and Ivana Miloš, who are currently responsible for tending to its tendrils. As a painter and a poet respectively, it is their belief and experience that a nearness to painting and poetry can encourage close ties to all beings, which is why they, as a collective, turn to community-establishing formats that open these realms of existence to others. They are based in Vienna, Austria, and participating in the great everywhere. Dunjiva is engaged in a practice of seeking, with the hope not of finding but of always being on the way.
Forest of Arden
Cup your hands as if to hold a dream
just as a kernel draws water into itself
and a wood will appear: a green cloud
and a birch trunk like a chord of light
and a thousand eyelids start to flutter
speaking a forgotten tongue of leaves
then you’ll remember a white morning
when you waited for the gates to open
(...)
Zbigniew Herbert
Winter Solstice Portrait 2024
How long have we forgotten how to listen!
(...)
Press, oh press in the day of destruction
The listening ear to the earth,
And you will hear, through your sleep
You will hear,
How in death
Life begins.
Nelly Sachs
Dunja Krcek Gallery
To a Leaf Falling in Winter
At sundown when a day’s words
have gathered at the feet of the trees
lining up in silence
to enter the long corridors
of the roots into which they
pass one by one thinking
that they remember the place
as they feel themselves climbing
away from their only sound
while they are being forgotten
by their bright circumstances
they rise through all of the rings
listening again
afterward as they
listened once and they come
to where the leaves used to live
during their lives but have gone now
and they too take the next step
beyond the reach of meaning
W.S. Merwin
Ivana Miloš Gallery
Into your hand that will no longer touch
the earth's roughness or smoothness, I slip this leaf,
not quite a wing, nor quite a bright arrow
to serve as a guide, or a lamp, or an offering;
against the voracity of the abyss
it has only the power of the invisible. What it says
can do no more than defy ruin's thunder
with what can neither be seen, nor believed, nor
asserted
directly or through images. And yet it is this
I give you. What the leaf brings is like a faint trace in
the snow
of a passage that proves there is no smile but fades,
and no smile is born but under
time's hatchet.
Philippe Jaccottet
About Visual Strolls
Visual Strolls is not only an online gallery, an exhibition room, a portrait into the work of the invited artists. 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: Dunjiva Kollektiv