SYNOPSIS
One summer day in 1845, Henry David Thoreau went into the forest and built a small house to live for a while. In this cabin, he placed three chairs: one for solitude, one for friendship, and one for society. Now, 180 years later, we enter his home to stay for a while and build a shadow-forest to place three tables.
※Commissioned by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Busan Museum of Contemporary Art
REVIEW
Exploring the relationship between humans and the forest, IM Go-Eun’s Shadow-Forest is a screen adaptation of her own performance piece, first presented in collaboration with renowned German composer Heiner Goebbels at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. The film is divided into three chapters, each bearing its own evocative title: “Apple Tree for the Extinct Prophecy Bird,” “Beech Tree for the Silence of Moss,” and “Maple Tree for the Seeds of Lichens.”
Inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay Walden, the work layers celluloid and slide film with drawings, weaving them into a dense shadow play that blends multiple visual media. The resulting interplay of light and shadow, movement and stillness, becomes a powerful allegory for the conditions of existence shared by all nonhuman life. Mysterious and immersive, the piece lets the very apparatus of cinema—its flickering images, its choreography of illumination—mirror the intricate interdependence of all beings within the forest’s living network.
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
Henry David Thoreau left behind his writings and drawings, observing carefully the life of diverse animals and plants in the woods. The traces he left are reimagined as a work interwoven with various other stories and shifting shadows between light and darkness. “We may no longer know how to make fire, how to pray, or where the forest to pray in is”, but on the ruins already burned, we begin to rebuild a landscape of ‘a home as forest’ and ‘a forest as home.’
