I’m sitting on an upturned log in a forest glade. It’s summer, but you wouldn’t know it from the chill and the drizzle. I’m listening to humans singing somewhere far off in the forest.
The singing fades away into the distance and suddenly a bird’s song replaces it, loud and quite close by. Other birds join in, and now I hear a saw – a handsaw not a chainsaw. Even so, it is followed by an ominous creaking and then the inevitable crash and crush of a falling tree. A large one. I jump, but remain seated. It’s beginning to rain for real now, I pull up my hood and hunch into myself.
Some kind of large creature is crashing through the undergrowth to my right. It comes closer and is moving fast. I flinch as it races past me, unseen. Someone else does too, facing me across the clearing; our eyes meet and we share a smile at our reactions.
A whooping of monkeys starts up, interspersed with the calls of macaw and parrot. The tension breaks: this is Germany not the rainforest.
The forest glade is real, the rain is all-too-real, but most of the sounds around me are not. I can see some of the many loudspeakers in the trees if I look carefully (there is one in the above photo). Yet these sounds that I am fully aware are not real are startling me. Somehow they reach right past my vision and my conscious mind and grab my frontal lobe by the ear. If I close my eyes (which I do from time to time) this effect is almost overwhelming. Even the presence and sounds of other do not override this.
This damp glade in former East Germany is temporarily home to Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s installation FOREST (for a thousand years). “Sound has the ability to scare you, its invisible ghostly presence is connected to our primal fears.” says Janet Cardiff in The Walk Book