I LOOK TO THE TREES
October 2025
Photo by Carlfried Verwaayen
Graduation project for Design Academy Eindhoven
THE PROJECT
In dominant narratives of modernity, the living world is reduced to data points and resources to be controlled or managed. This objectification interferes with humanity’s direct experience of, and sense of entanglement with beings beyond ourselves.
‘I Look to the Trees’ is a sound installation and sculptural arrangement of fallen branches that demonstrates this web of relations, inviting us to connect to the more-than-human. Field recordings collected from the forest are combined with spoken poems — written among trees — that resonate through the wood, and can only be heard when placing your ear directly on the material.
This gesture of intentional listening calls us to slow down and reconnect to a fundamental truth: we belong in the natural world.
This project developed from a practice of spending time in a forest in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in order to challenge a subtle, yet deeply engrained idea that ‘human’ and ‘nature’ are separate entities.
In dominant narratives of modernity, the living world is reduced to data points and resources to be controlled or managed. This objectification interferes with humanity’s direct experience of, and sense of entanglement with beings beyond ourselves.
‘I Look to the Trees’ is a sound installation and sculptural arrangement of fallen branches that demonstrates this web of relations, inviting us to connect to the more-than-human. Field recordings collected from the forest are combined with spoken poems — written among trees — that resonate through the wood, and can only be heard when placing your ear directly on the material.
This gesture of intentional listening calls us to slow down and reconnect to a fundamental truth: we belong in the natural world.
This project developed from a practice of spending time in a forest in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in order to challenge a subtle, yet deeply engrained idea that ‘human’ and ‘nature’ are separate entities.