7000 oaks, Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung

Unexpected discovery-- here I am in Kassel, Germany. Rebekka, the first of the interviews in Europe must go to take care of Jan, her fiancee and father to her child on the way, as Jan's father has just passed on. What am I doing here, I wonder-- how is this project going to reach beyond itself and the lives that each of the participants is immersed in and dialogue with culture? If this has no reach outside of personal lives, then why have I devoted the next year of my life to it? What am I here to create?

I understand the benefits of engaging on an individual level, and I have already seen on an individual level how bringing film and questions into space catalyzes the processing, understanding, and meaning of experience. But how does it transfer beyond the life of Kent and Farion, Rebekka, Uwe, Lucy, and the other fasters and their elders? How does what happened in Death Valley, how do those questions transfer out into the world and speak to more than just the few whose direct experience and experiment it is?


Enter Kassel, Germany. Little do I know that the night I arrive is an all-night free museum festival. Later on Uwe is to tell me the story of Boniface destroying Thor's Oak as a symbol of Christianity's superiority over the native Germanic religion, and how this connects for him to the work of Joseph Beuys planting of 7000 oaks in this town of Kassel. Beuys refered to it as "Stadtverwaldung statt Stadtverwaltung", which to Uwe's translation calls forth "the governance of the forest instead of the governance of bureaucracy."


We are sitting with this work of Bueys, and the coming Dokumenta International Art Exhibition in 2012, and seeing how a dialogue can be continued between Bueys and the EarthlinkProject. Are there any connections to it at all? What is this work that is in it's larval stages?