Monte da Ervilha, 2025/2026
About:
Fungus, Forest, Futures is a transdisciplinary artistic project by Juliana Julieta that combines ecology, technology, and moving images, proposing a sensory and intimate encounter with the forest, exploring more-than-human relationships, challenging anthropocentric perspectives, and rehearsing other ways of relating to the environment.
The project is developed from the Monte da Ervilha, in Aldoar (Porto), a territory composed of forest, streams, and cultivated gardens, currently threatened by urban development projects that envisage the construction of large buildings and the consequent loss of green areas. More than just documenting this place, the project proposes to approach it through listening, presence, and creation.
Starting from the physicality of analog film, the creative work explores practices such as eco-development, developing in direct dialogue with the territory, working with plant and mineral elements from the place as co-producers of the image. Beyond the visual dimension, the process integrates field recordings, listening practices, and biofeedback devices that capture subtle variations in the environment and living organisms. Being on site thus becomes an essential part of the method: creating relationships, following its rhythms, and recognizing the overlap of multiple temporalities—from chronological and everyday time to seasonal rhythms, stratigraphic sedimentations, and geological scales that silently shape the landscape.
The project also unfolds into a set of public actions located in the territory - workshops, walks, listening practices, community meals and moments of collective experimentation - designed as devices for sensory closeness and knowledge sharing. These activities bring together different types of knowledge and practices, crossing art, ecology and situated experience, and promoting slower, more attentive and involved forms of presence.
In addition to activities in the field, the project provides for a public presentation, an exhibition and a publication which will bring together contributions from invited artists and researchers, extending the process into exhibition and editorial formats.
“Fungus, Forest, Futures” moves within this interval where the present can still be inhabited as a possibility. An exercise in attention in the face of disappearance, but also a practice of imagination: what forms of life, relationship, and community can still emerge when we are willing to listen to a place.
Team:
Creation, artistic direction, image, and sound: Juliana Julieta
Research and writing: Joana Rafael
Research and writing: Salomé Lopes Coelho
Research and writing: Susana Caló
Workshop and writing: Luísa Martelo
Herbal workshop and mentoring: Fernanda Botelho
Workshop: Monika Błoch
Sound, electromechanical devices: Sérgio Cachibache
Sound: Wouter Jaspers and Henrique Fernandes
Design: Luísa Martelo
Support: DGArtes, Criatório, Casa do Xisto