Message of the Forest can be understood as an ode to the Sal Forests of West Bengal. Or, an incantation to Meghe Dhaka Tara, 'The Cloud-Capped Star' (1960) by the Bengali film maker Ritwik Ghatak. Or even a song of devotion to the weathering of parent rocks and the oxidisation of protoliths.
Inspired by a lecture entitled The Message of the Forest delivered by Rabindranath Tagore at the Berlin Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat on June 1st 1921, and recorded on shellac at 78 rpm at the Hotel Esplanade on Potzdamer Platz, Berlin on June 4th 1921, Message of the Forest announces Tagore’s vision of a world campus that would emerge later the same year in his inauguration of Visva Bharati University and Santiniketan in West Bengal.
Ninety seven years later, the mp3 of the sounds of Tagore’s shellac speech speaks to the aged Banyan trees and summons todays young students.
His tonality and his choice of words invoke a temporal distance in which the millennial past of lateritic time curves towards the far future of a reddened earth. From these paths of image and sound, which travel without ever meeting, the Forest sends its Message to the O Horizon.
4mins, 4K Video, Colour, Sound
Commissioned by Frieze Film and Channel Four
