About

Thinking Forest explores sustainable approaches to both the making and presentation of art by means of ongoing experimentation. For us, sustainability extends beyond environmental impact to encompass the social, material, and temporal conditions in which artistic work is conceived, produced, and experienced.

Working in close collaboration with artists—and in dialogue with the forest environment that grounds our practice, we attend to the multiple timelines that shape each project. How much time is devoted to research, and how does that duration influence the work’s eventual form? How do the forest’s seasonal rhythms enter into and transform the artistic process? And to what extent do we seek to preserve a work, or instead allow natural processes of weathering and decay to unfold?

These questions guide every project we undertake. Rather than striving for overarching conclusions, we approach each initiative as an opportunity to develop situated, context-specific responses – insights that continue to inform and evolve the way we work.

Initiator and visual artist Gerbrand Burger was educated at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and the School of Visual Arts and Cooper Union in New York. He participated in the post-academic program of De Ateliers in Amsterdam. In 2015 he built his own wooden house in Amsterdam, which made him realize that working with wood and with his own hands should be central to his artistic practice; since then he has been working as a sculptor and mainly with wood. In 2017, Gerbrand was initiator and co-founder of cooperative Square 28, with which he realized a newly built artist studio complex in Amsterdam.

The idea for Thinking Forest stems directly from his work as an artist: after moving his studio to the new cooperative, he realized that it is simply untenable to continue producing sculptures that accumulate in the studio. He decided to work with wood from the region and place sculptures back in the forest after they are displayed. His desire to work in closer contact with trees and forests gave him the idea of growing and harvesting his own material, and the idea subsequently grew into Thinking Forest, which, in addition to supplying the material for art projects, also shows works by other (inter)national artists, and stimulates, facilitates and disseminates ideas, debate and ecological knowledge through publications.

While reading, researching and talking to specialists about trees and forest management, Gerbrand became aware of the importance of long term thinking, what Roman Krznaric calls cathedral thinking, and the need to integrate human (economic) activity with an increasingly healthy and resilient forest ecology. Instead of reading more and talking more, Burger felt the immediate urge to do something for real, with actual trees and people, and to make sure that long term thinking becomes long term acting.