Breathing Trees

For me, one of the most fascinating facts about trees is the way they get most of their mass. It doesn't come from the ground, (otherwise, a big hole would form under each of them) but from us.

We exhale the carbon that the trees absorb and turn into their bodies. The trees exhale the oxygen that we use to burn the carbon of other living things in order to stay alive.

Nashashibi's track „Luft und Holz II“ contains wood noises as well as breathing sounds and it made us think about this connection we have to trees and the forest through our breath.

The video follows a journey through different seasons and times of day in a forest environment, with the trees appearing to breathe in sync with the water sounds.

We got involved in the Realtime Festival competition through a film group at the Hochschule für Künste in Bremen and worked on the project within the group, but most of all, in our free time.

We had more of an experimental approach. As a rough structure, we wrote down the noises, impressions, thoughts, and ideas that came to us for each section of the piece.

With our notes we then went to different forests and collected footage with different equipment at different times of the day, seasons and weather conditions.

From this material, we then puzzled together our video and if there was a gap or something didn't fit, we went back into the forest to look for the missing puzzle piece.

On October 23rd 2021 we received the "Young Talent Prize" from the Realtime Festival for New Music.