Forest Telephonists

2023

Forest Telephonists is a collaborative installation by Tara Gilbee and Karla Pringle that attends to how bodies receive, transmit, and are moved by environmental signals across distance. Working with illness, interoception, and site-specific sensing, the work explores communication beyond language through shared atmospheric and multispecies fields.

Forest Telephonists

Tara Gilbee and Karla Pringle @ AIRSPACE PROJECTS 3-19 November 2023

Karla and Tara have chosen to act as a type of message bank to several environments. Their bodies, negotiating the space of long-term illnesses, have become formidable readers of nuanced atmospheric phenomena. The artists trace and process a deeper temporal space for themselves. A connected sensous proxy for what is absent as much as what may be present. They message each other, not with words but with affects sent from their respective umwelten. Hoping the deep time and scale between them can make sense of signs they are only just learning to speak, or maybe, remember.

Gathering notes, dense with information, (that they may – or may not understand) Karla and Tara witness themselves moving and making with the knowledge of their deep interrelatedness and the whisperings of their endosymbiotic bodies. This language is not theirs, it’s a language of biomes, deep time, of space, and place. Their behaviours transcribe biotal interfaces into acts, and they move and morph into open switchboards for their environments. They had hoped they would overhear themselves- and understand something new. But they have come to believe their interoceptive relationships with place – a convergence of signs and languages from an array of beings – may not be speaking to their consciousness. Instead these entangled languages move them, and they begin to see they aren’t the operators, but the signals themselves, waiting to be reconnected…