©GaiaReiner

Moodfilm for my project "relayering pine" within the semester project "Syntopia – Harvesting the Forest" supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Karola Dierichs at weißensee kunsthochschule berlin.

The textile and olfactory collection "relayering pine" invites the forest into your own home and connects the two contrasting worlds of city and forest.

Starting from one‘s own front door, the forest around Berlin was investigated. Sandy soils are home to pine trees that have been planted for economic use. It is an orderly, monotonous forest - the pines are evenly spaced and present a flat picture with a vertical color gradient from dark brown and orange to dark green. The canopies of the tall narrow trees sway strongly in the wind, creating dancing shadow fields. Since the forest is used economically, pine trees are regularly felled. From the tree, only the wood is processed into a high-value product - the bark is downcycled and used thermally or as bark mulch. Needles are not yet used further.

Yet it is precisely these components of the tree that most capture the character and history of the forest. They are directly influenced by external conditions. The pine needles, for example, grow less when the air quality is poor. Synthesis with other forest organisms is also visible on these parts of the tree, for example, when moss grows on the bark.

In order to allow us to experience the forest in space, these same outer parts of the pine tree were collected. Needles, bark and mirror bark were brought into textile surfaces, as well as processed into fragrance oils, in order to address the different senses of perception. Each surface and each fragrance oil is a layer of the tree and rearranged, they form together the tree and thus also the forest.