muinaiseen tammeen ilmestyy onkalo, jossa tilan ja ajan merkitys vääristyy
tässä hämärässä koppakuoriainen kokee muodonmuutoksen ja katoaa
yhä uudelleen ja uudelleen
puun kuoreen ilmestyy matokarttoja
kaiverruksia, jollain vieraalla kielellä jota en vielä ymmärrä
altistun outouden ääreen
en etsi pakoreittiä
Dead Wood Orchestra is made by scientists who fell through the gaps of the system, and who now wander erratically through forested landscapes looking for a god. Not the god of certainty, measurement or control, but the god of death and rebirth.
They lost faith in the promise that the world could be fully understood by breaking it apart, naming its parts, and turning them into instruments of knowledge. They resisted the role of God–the position of the one who stands outside the system, observes it, explains it, and gives it meaning. Instead, they wonder what kinds of meanings arise when we fall from the centre of the story.
Dead Wood Orchestra is an attempt to find new rules and new perspectives for understanding the ecosystems around us and within us. It is an alias and a growing collection of works exploring the meaning of dead and slowly dying trees in forest ecosystems. It asks what it means for a tree to grow old in a landscape shaped by fast paced [intensive] forestry, where forests are understood as collections of individual trees, measured in volume, growth and economic value. The work attempts to listen to what falls outside this perspective–to that which resists the logic of extraction, to that which persists on its own terms, or fails while trying.
At the centre of the project is a custom-built instrument that translates DNA sequences from bracket fungi into sound. The instrument is designed to mimic the genetic reading process found in all living cells, where nucleotides are read in triplets called codons. In biology, each codon corresponds to an amino acid; here, each codon is translated into a musical note, allowing the biological processes of a forest to become the material for a composition.
In Dead Wood Orchestra, bracket fungi act as biological witnesses. Their presence reveals something of a forest’s age, continuity and ecological complexity, while their diversity reflects the relationships a forest is capable of sustaining. By translating their genetic material into sound, Dead Wood Orchestra creates site-specific compositions shaped by the organisms that inhabit—and record—the history of each place.
Dead Wood Orchestra is a practice of staying with the unfamiliar: of listening to processes that unfold at different scales of time, and of searching for other ways of understanding our place within an ecosystem. The project is an ongoing collaboration between artistic practice, scientific inquiry and the more-than-human world.
Works:
what does it mean for a tree to grow old ?
Kuusiluoto, Helsinki
2026