"the original, natural forests now simply remain a memory in the minds of those lucky enough to have seen them. Those who didn't experience them don´t know what they have lost"
From "The Ecology of Sumatra", T. Whitten, 1998

The title of my work refers to the only way I could possibly describe my connection to the world, my perception of the environmental crisis, my life long inward relation to the ecology of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. Through an ongoing dialogue with this place, walking and wandering cognisant of the remaining bits of forest in- and outside my immediate view , questioning the nature of my perception through facts, imagination, experience, movement and language, and with the camera as means to unfold new ways of looking at an (photographically) unfamiliar landscape, my work depicts a phenomenological descent into a closer, more embedded sense of ecological belonging, one that preserves a feeling of intimacy between me and the world, yet one that is more realistically attuned to the actual, transitional and unsettling reality of the ecological era I live in, commonly referred to as the age of the 6th mass extinction. My work does not intend to convey a sense of some new found harmony, I´m not looking for an escape route out of the gloom of the reality of the global environmental crisis. Instead, the belonging I refer to, and therefore the essence of my work, unfolds from within, through continuous walking and wondering, and grasping my being in a place, with which I ironically would never have connected to, if it wasn`t home to some of the most endangered species on earth.

“Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.”
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 1946