Woodland Habitats – Polly Stanton with Kohei Fujito and Ruth Langford

Filmmaker and artist Polly Stanton presents 'Elegy for an Occupied Forest’ discussing how pine plantations present eerie life worlds profoundly shaped and recomposed by the productions of capital. They are vibrant sites that remake the forest into a strange and occupied landscape of human-made modification and disturbance. Following her short talk is a discussion with Ainu artist Kohei Fujito and Song Woman and Story Teller, Yorta Yorta woman Ruth Langford.

Polly Stanton explores these complex forest assemblages through the moving image work Indefinite Terrains (2019), which traces the delicate ecologies and entanglements of the Moonlight Flat Pine Plantation in Dja Dja Wurrung country (Central Victoria, Australia). By recounting the process of working with these spaces, as well as thinking alongside a number of writers and theorists, Polly considers the plantation as an ecotone of submerged histories and indeterminate futures.

Read more about Mutual Ecologies here.

The tactile and immaterial qualities of woodland habitats series is presented by Asialink Arts and RMIT University, supported by CAST Research Group, RMIT University and the Australian Government through the Australia-Japan Foundation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

'Mutable Ecologies' Project Partners: Asialink Arts, Musashino Art University, NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC].

Banner image: Polly Stanton, Skulls, 2018.