Whispering Forest, 2023
Site-specific Installation with Natural Wood and Sound Technology
Whispering Forest is a site-responsive, evolving installation that grows as a global living archive— built each time from locally reclaimed or ethically sourced trees native to the place where it appears. Each iteration forms a temporary grove: a constellation of standing trunks and branches— weathered, salvaged, and re-activated through subtle sculptural and sonic interventions that translate forest presence into an experience of listening.
The project originates from a deeply personal source: a mulberry tree in Azerbaijan that once belonged to the artist’s late grandfather. After the tree’s natural death, its presence became the conceptual seed of Whispering Forest—a way of bringing memory back into resonance rather than allowing it to disappear. What began as an intimate act of remembrance has since expanded into a global practice, where trees from different landscapes carry not only ecological histories but human ones as well.
Rather than transporting a single fixed artwork across borders, Whispering Forest travels as a method and score. In every location, the work is rebuilt with local trees, local labor, and local ecological narratives, allowing the installation to become a portrait of that landscape—its species, climate, and histories of extraction and care. The project has developed through a growing network of sites including Azerbaijan, Georgia, Latvia, Italy, Germany, Saudi Arabia and the United States, with the next iteration planned for United Arab Emirates and Argentina.
Sound is a central element of the work and is derived from plant-based data of the same tree species as the dead trunks used in each installation. Using a custom-built sound technology, biological signals from living plants of the corresponding species are translated into subtle sonic compositions, creating a direct material and conceptual continuity between the living forest, the fallen tree, and the sculptural form. The forest becomes both archive and instrument.
Arranged as an intentional spatial composition—part sanctuary, part resonant organism—the installation invites slow movement, stillness, and attunement. Whispering Forest resonates with the broader narrative of the exhibition, serving as both a meditation on ecological healing and a reflection on the invisible bonds between technology and nature. It calls attention to the urgent need for conservation and the restoration of balance, underscoring the scars left upon environments worldwide while inviting hope through the shared resilience of trees.
In this sense, Whispering Forest functions as both installation and international ecology project: a platform where each country’s local trees become co-authors, and where the global whole exists only through the specificity of place—rooted in a single mulberry tree, and extending outward into the world.
