Drifts Festival 2025 – Unknown Territories – Forests / Malmitalo, Helsinki

Forests have long been vital ecosystems, sustaining diverse species and providing shelter, sustenance, and spiritual significance for human communities. Across time and geographies, they have been central to myths and legends, often depicted as liminal spaces inhabited by spirits and supernatural beings. These stories reflect an ancient understanding of forests as places where ecological and cultural memories intertwine. However, the forces of imperialist expansion and extractivist capitalism have sought to suppress this other knowledge, reducing forests to mere commodities to be exploited for economic gain, erasing both biodiversity and the ancestral knowledge.

The relentless expansion of capitalist urbanization, industrial agriculture, mining, and logging has devastated forest landscapes, systematically displacing both human and more-than-human inhabitants. As forests are cleared for development, their vital role in ecological balance—regulating climate, sustaining biodiversity, and fostering interspecies relationships—is threatened. Unknown Territories: Forests resists these dominant forces of extraction and exploitation, embracing the forest as a site of coexistence, reciprocity, and resilience. It challenges the mechanistic and utilitarian view of forests as resources, reorienting them as dynamic, living spaces.

Forests transcend linear histories, existing as both material spaces and metaphysical terrains. In Indigenous and mythological cosmologies, forests are entangled with ancestral spirits, non-human agencies, and ecological balances that blur the boundaries between the visible and invisible, the past and the future. Whether inhabited by ancestral spirits or acting as agents in the balance of ecosystems, forests challenge conventional boundaries and offer alternative epistemologies rooted in relationality, deep time, and shared memory. At a time of ecological precarity, the Unknown Territories: Forest becomes a site for mourning and radical imagination, offering a pathway toward survival and the reclamation of planetary futures.

Drifts Festival

Artistic Director    
Soko Hwang

The artwork entrance_in-between_exit 2025 is based in explorations of subterranean networks beneath the Helsinki area. The installation incorporates materials identical to those used in critical infrastructure systems for the transmission of data, water, and thermal energy. Patterns etched into the flatten metallic components emphasize the tension between decay and modernization, referencing obsolete cartographies, cryptic numerical codes and symbols, recovered artefacts, and an overarching sense of spatial inaccessibility imposed by the surrounding granite bedrock. Materials: tin, copper, silver, textile, steel, fiberglass, spray paint, aluminum, inkjet print on fiberglass. 11 pieces in total.