Awarded by Museum Folkwang & Wüstenrot Stiftung for the Dokumentarfotografie Förderpreise 16
In the Forest Behind My Father’s House
2025-2026
In the Forest Behind My Father’s House is a multi-sensory, research-based project exploring ecological collapse, inherited belief systems, and queer embodiment through the collapsing monocultural forests of rural western Germany where I grew up. Working across photography, film, text, sound, and installation, the project approaches the forest not as landscape alone, but as a living site shaped by hunting culture, silenced histories, ecological transformation, and uneven regeneration.
As drought, storms, and extraction transformed the forest I grew up beside, I returned to my family home in rural western Germany. Facing the remains of the collapsing monocultural forest and its inhabitants as a queer and neurodivergent artist, I began seeing the place differently, questioning the traditional structures through which I had learned to understand gender, body, and belonging.
The collapse created space to move differently: to observe, to listen, and to look closely at the human and more-than-human inhabitants that grow, move, and survive within this landscape. Deer navigating and feeding on collapsing monocultural forests they are forced to inhabit, hunted by hunters who support the rangers pressured by the German wood industry to keep planting them, while diverse seeds continuously attempt to reclaim the soil and stabilize the imbalance of the forest through forms of diversity.
I wrote letters to reflect on these different positions sharing the same ground, searching for ways of understanding huntedness, fear, history, transformation, and coexistence from within rather than from distance. Imagining the inner worlds of these perspectives, I photographically shapeshifted my body into multiple bodies, speculating what it might mean to inhabit them and searching for ways of relating beyond fixed identities and dominant narratives — being human and more-than-human, witness and participant, self and other at once.
I documented these embodied situations using what I call “the tools of the hunters”: accessible working-class technologies such as night-vision cameras, drones, microscopes, and flashlights. Tools historically used for surveillance and control are redirected toward intimacy and alternative perception, creating “poor imagery” that reveals the raw situatedness of encounters and moments while discovering the unknown without defining it.
Working across photography, film, text, sound, and sensory installation, the project creates multiple entry points into experiencing forest, inhabitants, and bodies not as separate entities, but as living sites attempting to regenerate through diversity while remaining shaped by systems larger than the village itself.
The project continues to evolve through long-term engagement with local hunters, rangers, and queer and neurodivergent inhabitants in rural life. By bringing the work back into the village it emerged from, the research expands into questions of accessibility within artistic research for those directly affected by it, while becoming part of the ongoing negotiations, contradictions, and transformations unfolding within the landscape itself.
Installation
Multi-sensory environment with photographs, film, sound, scent, and text fragments.

Graduationshow Royal Academy of Arts, The Hague 2025

Thesis Art Book & Letter collection
24 x 20 cm,  256 Pages
Printed on 120g silver and snow white paper, 
contained in a book box with 3d printed title 

the book holds:
6 Chapters an introduction, letters to the deer, 
to the rock of the witches, to the hunter, to
the father and a closure; 
A counter-map of the story, The scent of pine

Selected by KABK Graduation 2025 for one of the best designs

Experimental publication combining letters, images, scent and research

Activation
45 Min
Performative reading selection of the book, will accompany the book launch, extending its material into a shared, collective space.
6 Chapters an introduction, letters to the deer, 
to the rock of the witches, to the hunter, to
the father and a closure; 
A counter-map of the story, The scent of pine

Selected by KABK Graduation 2025 for one of the best designs

Experimental publication combining letters, images, scent and research
Short Film

Narrated in collaboration with Joachim Papenheim
Soundscape by Flurina Mia Häberli
13:28 Min

Zine

24 x 20 cm, 24 Pages
Self-Published Artist Zine
Presented by the Royal Academy of Art at Polycopies and Les Rencontres d'Arles
Publication
Methods
The project is developed through embodied research and speculative methods. Central to the work is a process of shapeshifting, in which I move between different perspectives: human and more-than-human, hunter and hunted, observer and observed.
Letter-based narration
Listening as artistic method
Repurposing surveillance tools (night vision, flashlights, drones, microscopes)
Sensory storytelling (sound, scent, touch)
Collaboration 
This project is a collaboration — with the forest that raised me, with deer sleeping in the gorse of the new grounds, with local hunters and rangers who shared their world. It holds the memory of the witches’ rock, the labor of my father, the quiet strength of my neurodivergent mother and sister.

Sounddesigner
Flurina Mia Häberli

Type designer
Anne-Dauphine Borione
Symposium: The Activated Image
Kunstmuseum Den Haag, 15.04.2025
organised by The Networked Audience research group and in partnership with Fotomuseum Den Haag my work was a visual responedet to Daria Tuminas
Photocontest: Inner Visions
Bellcollective x Fotomeyer
Berlin,10.05.2025
Winner of Inner Vision Photocontest at the Female Photo Days in Berlin among 14 other artists and photographers.
Exhibited in Berlin at Fotomeyer.


Installation & Performative Readings 
Graduationshow 2025
Royal Academy of Art
The Hague, 03.-08.07.2025




↑Back to Top