Reforest

Adam Man


For a year we—me, Judith Hamann (sound artist), and Michiyasu Furutani (dancer, artist), or Furu for short—went together again and again into the same forest. We got to know the surroundings and recorded them—through our senses, and on video and audio. From our relationship with the forest we slowly built a space made of sounds, images, language, movement, and objects. Reforest premiered in December 2025 at brut in Vienna.

Reforest at brut
Interview with Adam Man in skug
Interview with Adam Man in Les Noveaux Riches


Process

In November 2024 we go to the forest for the first time. We have agreed that each of us relates to the surroundings and that we don’t pursue anything: no particular focus, no goals, no ideas. The first days we walk in silence; I—the only one of us who knows the forest, because it is the one in the village where my grandparents live—try to hold back and not walk ahead.

We go to the nearest forest, the one we can see from the house we are staying in and can reach on foot in fifteen minutes. And we always go to the same part of the forest; over the year we do not expand our territory—we go deeper into it.

During the time we spend together, we roam through the forest. We are drawn to places and objects: clearings, steep slopes, folds in the mountain, caves; tree stumps, moss-covered trunks, protruding roots, bones, lichens, and soft rocks. In some places we stay longer and return again and again. They become points of reference.

After the first stay in November we meet again in February and then in June, July, August, and finally again in October and November. Little by little we bring sounds, movements, fragments of wood, bones, words, videos back to the house we live in and into the space where we work.

In summer we begin with first sketches, distributing what we have found in the room. Now I think that at that moment we planted the work—the piece. And indeed, in the space of Reforest many things lie on the ground.

From June to October we move from the forest into the room that slowly becomes Reforest, and back again. We work on the images, the sounds, the movements, the texts, the objects. New things come from the forest and grow together with what is already there, changing it.

The spatiality of the forest—its connection of below and above, its hybridity of human intervention and spontaneity, its heterogeneity of different soils and light moods, its constant motion through wind and weather—creates the piece.



Piece

After a year, in December 2025, we show Reforest at brut in Vienna. What kind of space is it, I ask myself after one of the last rehearsals, that has emerged from our contact with the forest—for an encounter with others?

brut nordwest is an industrial hall with a large black box in the middle. Around it there is a lot of space. In this surrounding area Reforest begins: a floor installation of objects and video in the entrance zone, a setting for a reading at the level of the entrance into the black box.

The piece starts with a prelude in the reading area: Furu plays at the table placed there with small plastic animals that we found in the house. When after a few minutes he stands up and walks away, I take his place and read from the journal I kept throughout the year. Beside me a photograph is projected onto the wall; it shows the forest as seen from the house.

The excerpts from the journal tell of the forest and our relationship to it. Again and again the house appears, and the path from the house into the forest, and the boundary between the two. The text ends in a way that provokes the transition from the anteroom of the reading into the Reforest space inside the black box. People go in.

The black box is completely transformed: the unseated stands, the whole stage, and even beyond it, through an open slit in the curtain, the room behind it. On the floor there are charcoal and chalk drawings, wooden objects treated with forestry spray paint and tree foam; an installation of fluorescent tubes wrapped in tree fencing hangs from the ceiling; two large screens frame the space opposite each other at an angle; bones lie there as a fragile floor sculpture, and in the middle of them a 3D printer prints a skull that looks like the one made of bones on a black circle on a white sheet directly beside it. Another black circle hangs from the ceiling, with a pink cross on its back. Outside, behind the curtain, there is a bench and in front of it two large pieces of bark, curved and open upward. Sound comes from four channels, localizing noises, marking places—a composition by Judith that emerged from listening to the forest, as a soundtrack for the space.

People move everywhere, look at the images and the objects; at the beginning, in the first few minutes, they move quickly from one place to another—most want to see everything first and stay only briefly at individual stations. Then it becomes calmer; some sit down, others remain standing, and some stroll slowly.

At some point, attention shifts more and more to Furu, who moves from within the audience—at first part of it—more and more present, until he begins to dance very slowly on the stands—right down in the corner. The scene unfolds from that outermost point of the stands, with its drawings, objects, and spectators, across the entire surface and beyond it. Slowness turns into activity and interaction with the objects, up to a waltz with a broken-off trunk.

Furu returns to the audience; before that he touches an old globe that is part of the installation. The sound of the earth’s axis trembling as it turns leads into the increasing intensity of the sound in the space, and the images on the two screens move to the center. They show an injured forest, filmed with a handheld camera that comes painfully close to the trees.

At some point the audience notices Furu near the bones installed on the floor and the printer. They first see him walking slowly toward the things, looking at them, then at some point sitting down and lying down. After a long transition, an approach, Furu lies next to the animal bones we found in the forest and next to others that we replicated with the printer. Between machine, human, and animal, between one and the other reproduction, between death and vitality and functioning, Furu begins to move. Judith joins and plays the cello. Between her sounds and Furu’s movements, a space of closeness, familiarity, and openness emerges. Dance and sound are independent, and turned toward each other.

In the live performance at the end, as the conclusion and climax of the piece, the time spent together condenses. It reveals itself to the audience there, where for a certain time we all are: between the intimate play of the elements and the vastness of the space.



Future

Reforest shows our connection to the forest we visited and came to know over the course of a year. It also reveals us within it—our vulnerability, grief, anger, affection. The people who visit Reforest also go through these states: they move through a landscape that constantly changes in atmosphere and in the choreography of everyone’s movements. Reforest trusts its visitors, lets them be there. It is a space of shared feelings.

In the time we spent together with the forest, a way of working has emerged that is as strict as it is open: a precise engagement with the surroundings and the material it offers, which keeps its connection; an openness that is as attentive as it is casual and trusts what moves you—toward what wants to be seen of its own accord.

“Today I think we are searching for the future in the forest like for a treasure,” it says in the text I read at the beginning of the piece. Reforest is a piece that shows me how to continue working, how to make art: in the openness of relations and feelings. With Reforest I learned that what wants to exist side by side as equals—people, things, sounds, movements, words, images—must not close itself off. What wants to be perfect in itself becomes unfree and lonely.

Reforest as a live environment and a space for attendance creates a sense of the future: that we do not give up trying to be there together.