Forest as a Geopolitical Stage is an art and research initiative that began from one sentence by Uruguayan artist Tamara Cubas:”(Finnish forest industry company) UPM sucks life-force from Uruguay”. This evocative statement resonated deeply in my being as well as in my colleague Jussi Lehtonen and led to a 4-year art and research initiative asking if it is possible to collaborate beyond extractivist modes of operation. The initiative took place in 2020-2024 in Uruguay and in Finland meanwhile UPM built and opened the world’s largest single line pulp mill in Uruguay and expanded their eucalyptus monoculture plantations with unprecedented consequences to the local environment and society. Forest as a Geopolitical Stage produced residencies, workshops, research, documentary film (in postproduction), a theatre play and a public event with a funding from Kone Foundation and partnerships with Finnish National Theatre and Uruguayan NGO PROAC. The key question stirring these activities was how does an awareness of one’s own entanglements and being implicated in extractivist global practices for economic benefits (for few) change how one enacts.

The presentation investigates the role of art and artistic research amid large-scale, unpredictable social and ecological changes, the possibilities to make hidden narratives public, and the resistance that arises from intersecting struggles in south and north. It asks what the role of a body and embodiment is in making art public in the age of ecological collapse, how entanglements are embodied, and how a collective body emerges and resists. Arising from my research on embodied curating, I argue that in order to make the becoming public of art more attuned, transformative and impactful in today’s socio-political context, bodies involved with the practices of producing and presenting art must be acknowledged and cared for, their specificities and singularities must be recognised, and their presence and contribution must be understood as a co-constitutive part of the curatorial constellation. By summoning conditions for art to unfold that acknowledge and embrace the embodied, lived, intra-active nature of existence, a sense of a collective agency can emerge. It involves attending to connective links between seemingly separate bodies and it holds transformative potential.