“Forests | Unlearning” is an action and a research on the edges of citizenship.
It is the first step into an afforestation process, it is its physical impression and its narration, where the difference between building of a hut, speaking about it or dreaming it is still faint.
Space of this research is the forest: sum of fragile environments, juridical constructs and layered realities. Reservoir of political relationships that span from human to otherness.
Since our imagination is still held hostage to an identification of politics with an utterly model of sovereignty, seems impossible to think beyond it, nonetheless there are -and have been- many “forests moments”, where thinking the otherness it has been possible.
The forest is therefore the space where happens a defamiliarization process: it discloses that magical-linguistic principle which submits all of us to notions like institution, nature, citizenship, human.
Going into it or crossing it can’t leave us unaltered, and the body of the viewer takes on this sense of displacement.

Mixing the performative language with product design and audio narration, Mali Weil invites the audience to define the perimeter and -at the same time- to get lost in this research, whose edges coincide with the historical and geographical limits of the western imagination.
Throughout this double movement the forest isn’t anymore forest, but a polyphonic, ritual narrative which blurs times and experiences.
It isn't about looking for a neo-romantic and ecological vision of multispecies relationships, but it’s about unlearning the political through the juridical, or rather the most political tool our culture produced.
Children voices, objects and toys, tales about outlaws and other kins: many stories have voices, main characters or visible traces, others are hidden in the vegetation, or they can be perceived only indirectly, thanks their effects on other voices, on other actors or through the connections they establish.
And this fragile and unstable process becomes again forest.

Forests is a research-based process comprised of different episodes: a performance serie, a film, some temporary schools for future forests experts.
The first of these public moments "Forests | Recomposing" has been realized at Trento film Festival (IT), where “Forests” appeared for the first time as lecture.
Following the more narrative and dreamy episode which will happen at SAAL Biennaal, Mali Weil with "Forests | Making in Turin" (IT) in October, will start more directly to work on the juridical framework of this imaginary. However every step brings some meetings with different groups of people especially teenagers, with whom Mali Weil freely explores the forest as temporary and fictional juridical space. Also during the Tallinn residency, in parallel to the research and the set up, we will start a dialogue with a group of teenagers in order to actively involve them during the performance.

Mali Weil is an Italian based creative platform, mainly active in performance and design.
Through a layered use of a range of approaches, from design to visual, from editorial products to audiovisual formats, Mali Weil’s works investigate the potential of performance as a driving force for creating -and as a space for disclosure- political imagination.
Her projects are often shaped into expanded performative mechanisms, involving the audience directly into dynamic and open ended frameworks.
Mali Weil’s works and performances have been shown in Centrale Fies, La Triennale di Milano, MAXXI Museum, Milano Design Week, Month of Performance Berlin, ZHdK Zurich, Sinopale Biennal among others.

www.maliweil.org