The forest and the wood
2026, single channel video projection, colour, stereo sound , 51 min
The Forest and the Wood was filmed in the Swiss Val Fex, a landscape whose gentle hills, grasslands and distant mountain peaks evoke an almost archetypal image of tranquillity. The composition recalls the tradition of classical landscape painting: hill, river, sky and mountains are arranged in a seemingly harmonious whole, while the larch trees become actors within the landscape, reminiscent of the quasi-religious presence of trees in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich.
Val Fex is a place between two worlds, moving from the welcoming, pastoral landscape of the lower valley towards the increasingly inaccessible terrain leading to the glacier. The film itself has a similar double identity. On the one hand, it presents the landscape in real time, breathing and unfolding at the pace at which we might experience it if we were physically present. On the other, this continuity is interrupted by time-lapse sequences, accelerating time and forcing the viewer into a more abstract relationship with the landscape. As these two temporalities meet, the restorative quality of real time confronts the mechanical and potentially destructive character of accelerated time.
On the left flank of the valley, a virtual workforce advances through a digitally constructed forest of larch trees, and cuts it down, tree by tree. Then the process is reversed. The trunks rise, the trees return, the forest is whole again. In the virtual image, nothing has really been lost. Time can simply run backward.The film treats trees as building blocks: elements that can be assembled, removed and restored at will, while revealing the fundamental contradiction that nature is not a construct, and ecological loss does not obey the logic of an undo command. Beyond the horizon the glacier appears as a quiet reminder that what has been set in motion cannot simply be undone.
Friedrich Nietzsche, who spent eight summers in Val Fex, adds another layer to the choice of this location. His presence recalls those aspects of culture that resist industrialisation, philosophy being one of them, just as natural growth cannot be accelerated, dismantled and reconstructed without altering its very nature.
David Claerbout ©2026