participation in Gifts from the Sentient Forest project
Communication and Collaboration Between People & Trees in Northern Finland (2024–2026)
In years 2024-2026 I joined an international and interdisciplinary cohort of artists, performers, writers, and researchers exploring forest sentience and plant intelligence through creative practice. The project was part of research in collaboration between the University of Lapland Arctic Centre (Finland) and Southern Cross University (Australia) with support from the Kone Foundation (Finland) 'In the Woods' Funding Programme (2024 - 2026). I was working with movement research, ecosomatics, improvisation, and meditative practices, investigating how we might develop ways of listening and responding to the intelligence of forests through the body.
Get to know the project: https://www.sentientforestproject.com/project
Forest Retreats
The cohort gathered twice a year for residential retreats in Northern Finland, meeting twice a year to share research, experiment with artistic methods, and spend time in the surrounding landscapes. During the retreats, I facilitated sessions inviting participants to explore the relationship between bodily experience and the more-than-human world. These included a meditative journey into cellular breathing as well as an ecosomatics workshop. My approach draws on the understanding that we are not separate from the environments we inhabit. Through movement, sensing, stillness, and imagination, we can explore the body as a site of exchange with the wider living world.
Group Choreography
As a further contribution to the project, I guided the cohort in creating a group choreography as a gift to the landscape, and to the human and more-than-human members of the community who made the project possible. Emerging from our shared time in the forests of Northern Finland, the choreography became a gesture of reciprocity, gratitude, and acknowledgement. With the starting point in the memory of a particular element or site in nature, we experienced collective dance practice as a form of communication beyond human-centred perspectives. The choreography invited us to consider how artistic gestures might express our interdependence with the land and honour the relationships that sustain us.
´I step outside my comfortably furnished dwelling at the banks of Ilola river. I bring one foot, then another, slowly making my way through the fields and then into the forest. Before I notice, there is a full smile on my face and the thoughts fade to the background.
There is something really precious I have learnt during the past two years under the Gifts from the Sentient Forest project - to really lean back onto the sense of confidence and trust, lingering in it, as I turn into an intuitive creative practice with the more-than-human world. I have normalised for myself the idea that communication can be directed at, and received from, completely trans-species. And beyond any rational or scientific understanding of how the forest ecosystems work (although often very helpful). I also found a community that motivated me to work in that direction and showed other fascinating ways to look at the humans relationship with nature.
I meditate and dance with Mother Trees. I ask landscapes, boulders and tree trunks questions that I lack answers for. I create organic choreographies in nature. And I am taking time to make sense out of what I am doing, putting as a measure that whatever it is, I want to be part of even so slight shift towards a less destructive way of living. What is also important, doing this work makes me absolutely filled with joy.
Transcription, meeting a tree: I am. Here. Feet on the forest floor. Eyes closed. Hear the wind. Hear the breath. Swaying. Open. Press down with one foot. Weight shift. Pelvis tilted. Long stretch up. Hands straight. Fingers straight. Less tension. Less tension. Less tension. Swaying. Bend. Arms bend. Graaaasp aaaawe. Head down down down. Neck loose loose loose. Roots in front of my eyes. Pelvis down. Drop. Down. Throw the weight. Land on moss. Wet. Watch the wind. Branches bare. Swaying. Just laying. No more standing. Just laying. We are.
I think that as a dancer, moving outdoors in different terrain and under different weather conditions makes my body much more responsive to the environment. The movement vocabulary grows really creative, bringing me in unpredictable directions. I keep getting inspired by the multitude of sensorial information I receive from nature. This combination - noticing how vulnerable I am as a human being, the relaxing effect on the nervous system, exploring improvisational tools in dance - easily lands somewhere at the edge of the therapeutic and the artistic. And I can only confirm that it feels that I have been dancing on that edge the entire time, appreciating the gentleness of every process I have encountered myself enter.
Sentience is, perhaps, what arises in the shared spaces. That aliveness, tingling, pulse, vibration, pull towards… as a response to the presence of the other. And the longer I stay in those shared spaces the more I recognise that I am actually standing in my own presence, or that there is no certain other.´
essay about sentience
Dagmara Maslowska, 2025
Artistic Contribution: Exhibition
10 June-1 August 2025 at Villa Vinkkeli, Rovaniemi (Finland)
The following text is quoted from the official exhibition website:
Forests make life on Earth possible by nurturing biodiversity, regulating water quality, mitigating climate fluctuations, affording habitats for pollinators, and supplying food, fibre, medicine, shelter, well-being, and other forms of sustenance. As the global population surges past eight billion people, however, more and more of the planet’s natural resources are required to satisfy human needs at the expense of other life forms. Global deforestation and ecosystem degradation continue to accelerate, with an estimated four-hundred million hectares of forests converted to agricultural and other uses since 1990. Yet, apart from their ecological importance, old forests have aesthetic, cultural, emotional, and spiritual value because of the powerful capacities that reside within them and that can, through close observation, remind us of the origins of life on Earth. Forests are natural and cultural nexuses. Ancient trees in particular are connected to personal and collective histories and identities. As old forests disappear, the cultural heritage associated with them risks becoming extinct.
Exhibition curators were Francis Joy and John C. Ryan. Contributing artists included Annette Arlander, Evgenia Emets, Francis Joy, Satu Kalliokuusi, Zoë Koivu, Lydia Reuhkala, Milja Laine, Samin Lee, Dagmara Masłowska, Hekla Muotka, Mykyta Peregrym, Julija Pociūtė, John C. Ryan, Marjo-Riikka Stenius, and Mira Sunnari.
The full exhibition catalogue is freely available online and offers further insight into the artists' contributions, and the project's interdisciplinary research.
My artistic contribution to the Gifts from the Sentient Forest group exhibition consisted of a mixed-media installation and an experimental dance video with a narrated poem.
Wider audiences and research
The project extended beyond the cohort's retreats and exhibition, creating opportunities for public dialogue and further interdisciplinary research. Its programme included public discussions and online seminars addressing forest sentience, plant intelligence, and the ways in which the arts, humanities, and sciences might contribute to new understandings of our relationships with trees and other forms of life. The project also participated in the Great Forest Dialogue (report, 2025). The research process also gave rise to journal publications by John C. Ryan and Francis Joy, further developing ideas explored through the project's collaborative work.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2025.2610929
