The Forest Answers: Reimagining our relationships with forests through language
Our project Niin Metsä Vastaa (As the Forest Answers) explores our collective imagination of Finnish forest-relationships. During spring we developed a new workshop format for co-creating intentional language to inspect and shape our relationships with nature. Niin Metsä Vastaa seeks to co-develop a creative dictionary of new language defining the need of future forest relationships, and introduce the work to Finnish society.
Iines
Growing up with Finnish forests, I never recognised how our societal relationship with them had shaped the ecosystem around me. What we called a forest could have been a biodiverse haven or a monocrop industrial wood field waiting to be clear-cut every few decades. There is no difference in Finnish or English to separate those two things from the human perspective, but for many other species, the difference is crucial.
The language we use to describe things is a window to our experiences. Words can bring a previously unrecognised collective stream to societal consciousness. They can also be used to hide, to build walls around something that is true. The dominant language always pushes something into the margins — why is this accepted in the discourse while that is not?
Savannah
Unlike Iines, I didn’t grow up with the forests of Finland — nor in or around them. My childhood was spent among the woodlands and carefully organised fields of Wiltshire in South-West England. That being said, after four years of living in Helsinki I am no stranger to Finland’s forests and Finland’s deep connection to these spaces that teeter the line between ecological haven and resource bank.
My introduction to Finnish forests saw these spaces as abundant and accessible environments that offered respite from the urban environment — whether an hour from Helsinki, or far north up in Finnish Lapland. Having forests on your doorstep — even when in the capital city — is a wonderful privilege to experience, a balancing energy for the hustle and bustle of everyday life. And yet, when I review all the ways in which we engage with these spaces, a theme of extraction emerges.
How, then, can we shift our imagination of forests and our relationships to and with them? The concept of Linguistic Relativity explains how language shapes our perceived realities, belief systems, assumptions and ways of relating to each other and the world. It delineates how the words we use to describe relationships, environments and co-habitants have a tangible effect on our behaviours towards them. In this project, we draw on this intrinsic connection between language and collective imagination, with the aim of decoupling the words, stories and terms of extraction towards a more reciprocal, caring and plural description of Finnish forests. In Niin Metsä Vastaa, we have been exploring the potential of intentionally creating new language reflecting the multiplicity of nature relationships and interactions.
The project name refers to a Finnish proverb “Niin metsä vastaa kun sinne huudetaan” that translates to “The forest answers in the same way one shouts into it”. The idea behind it is about reciprocity, that you can only receive back what you give out. Conceptually thinking, we can see the effects of our use of language reflected in the forests.
