#relating forests - Myths, Humans and Nature I

About the creative online event to "relating forests":

Theatre scientist Catherin Persing, photographer Yannick Cormier and literary scholar Harald Gaski will offer inspiring insights into how myths work, how people relate to nature and discuss the significance of mask rituals in Europe. The aim of the event is to develop a deeper understanding of the role of myths and rituals in our relationship with nature. We want to explore how these elements can be used to raise awareness of sustainable development and stimulate a shift in our thinking.
The online event is aimed at artists, cultural practitioners, environmental organisations and anyone interested in sustainability, art and nature.

Date and time:

13. march 2025 9:00- 12:00

8. april 2025 9:00 - 12:00

register link coming soon.
If you interested to join, you can write us on mail@theatre-fragile.de

About Relating Forests:

With an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration, the project focuses on re-imagining the relationship between nature and culture through the exploration of imagination, European mythologies and rituals. The 16-month project involves three institutions committed to sustainable development and four artists specialising in storytelling, mask theatre and sound work. The approach aims to stimulate a critical view of the relationship between people, nature and landscape, and to create innovative artistic offerings that engage emotionally and intellectually.
The project includes an artistic exchange with theoretical input and a focus on participatory methodology, as well as three workshops in France, Germany and Norway with aesthetic explorations in the forest and exchanges with experts, artists, educators and young people from the region.

About the lecturer

Catherine Persing
Catherin Persing is a theatre and literary scholar who deals with ecological perspectives in the performing arts. Her research currently focuses on alternative perceptions of nature, landscape and non-human entities in the context of changing human-environment relationships. As part of her dissertation project ‘Performing Plants’, she is investigating how the inclusion of plants in artistic and activist formats affects the dramaturgy, narrative style and the human-nature relationship of these formats.

Yannick Cormier
After producing a photographic series on the ancestral traditions that are still celebrated to the rhythm of trances, ceremonies and sacrifices in Tamil Nadu, in southern India, which can be found in the collection Dravidian Catharsis, Yannick Cormier is continuing his research into contemporary rites in France and Europe. From 2017 to 2020, he will produce a new series in the Iberian Peninsula, Espiritus de Invierno, documenting the carnival rites practised in this region.
The photographer shows this form of resistance to the cultural identity of so-called traditional societies or smaller communities that have not yet been completely anaesthetised by the modern consumerist world. It is an attempt to reveal the mythological attitudes of these groups.
His photography brings together the spiritual and the material, fiction and reality, tradition and modernity. His photographs are living images that he draws from travel, social rites, religious ceremonies, cultural fantasies, dreams and, more generally, from all the games, sacred or mundane, that disguise identity and appearance.

www.yannickcormier.com

Hard Gaski
Harald Gaski is from Tana in Finnmark and is a professor of Sami literature at Sami University College. He has been central to the development of Sami literature as an academic discipline since the mid-1980s. He is also a fiction writer and has translated Sami literature into Norwegian and English. In his research, Gaski has been interested in indigenous aesthetics, Sami myths and traditional values, as well as the multi-artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää.

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