Forest Silent Gathering

For Forest Silent Gathering, a group of audience members meet inside a forest at sunset and follows a soundtrack with the help of headphones. An audio-social architecture is created that lets the viewer be alone together. Changing distances invite us to find new proximities. Absent figures become protagonists. As the communal space takes shape and transforms, Forest Silent Gathering makes us reflect on the bonds between people, forests and histories. What is it that keeps us together? 

• Begüm Erciyas lives and works between Berlin and Brussels and has a background in molecular biology and genetics. She develops transdisciplinary formats, which go beyond the frontal blackbox setting. The tension between isolation and togetherness is a central topic in her practice. Her works invite the audience to a state of complete solitude and to simultaneously perform and listen. They consider "togetherness" as a task rather than as a given.

When you are all alone in that forest, you also realise how precarious our existence still is, when the insanely complex software our society has become falls away for a moment. – pzazz

Forest Silent Gathering via an elongated, shared but also isolated chain - resolving the tension between isolation and community. That results in a simultaneous feeling of loneliness and belonging. – Etcetera