The sky murmurs with a low muffled thunder as I walk through the Hague Forest. I can make out the royal stairs in the far-off distance.
The installation 'The Moving Forest' draws from the violent conflation of political and natural (dis)harmony in nationalist narratives and mythologies. Its title references the moment Shakespeare's Macbeth is defeated by an army of disguised branch-bearing soldiers, mimicking a forest on the move. They have set out to restore the `natural order' that Macbeth has disrupted by murdering the supposed rightful king. Through a set of omnidirectional screens depicting artificial military lookout-trees, 'The Moving Forest' aims to play with notions of observation, interiority/exteriority and the role of camouflage, illusion/deceit and the (un)natural in the perception and othering of the imagined enemy.
Enter the Prologue, in his hand a scroll and at his back the Hague Forest.
He clears his throat as he unfurls this shredded piece of paper, “Ahum”. A brief pause.
“In the woods there lies the scene,” he begins.
“Not too far from the residence of our esteemed king, a crowd gathered around a bard who spoke at the base of a wondrous tree.”
The Prologue climbs the stairs to further his reach, they are revealed to be the steps of the royal court.
“The living essence that flew through the tree was said to run through every vein of the king’s own folk too.”
He points at the audience and smiles.
“So famed grew the story of this wondrous tree, that the bard set it to parchment and all the kingdom rushed to claim their copy.”
The Prologue continues, his face now marred by sorrow.
“But when the copies ran out, the folk saw that the tree was gone, cut down into the thousands of sheets that inhabited their books ”
The Prologue points to a rotten tree stump.
“Mourning their loss, they warded off anyone who was found to deliver such deceitful copies of the original tree”
“And so a fight begun,” the Prologue murmurs to rush his introduction to an unsatisfactory and sudden close.
He exits the stage.
