forest documents, Reading Room
Accompanying forest documents, a reading room in collaboration with librarian-artist John Latour, provides a number of publications and documents from our Elastic Spaces interdisciplinary research team, on a diagonal to a large format video projection. The other side of the free-standing wall provides a viewing space with benches, for immersion into an old growth forest, through a spatialized video projection in stereoscopic 3D (S3).
The Elastic Spaces research presented on the Reading Room tables includes the following: publications from a number of researchers we worked with over a seven to nine year period of time, a number of documents from the Ecoforestry Institute Society, and a forthcoming artist book memoir from Elastic Spaces Press by Pacheedaht Elder William (Bill) Jones, Chronicles of the Forest: From the Walbran to Fairy Creek | What the Forest Needs, Our Heart Needs (2025). The forest ‘documents’ for viewers to browse and immerse themselves and be in conversation with include the 2 large format video projections located back to back on the free-standing wall, as well as the reading materials situated on the 2 tables located on a diagonal to the 2D projection.
Pacheedaht Elder William Jones signing his book, Chronicles of the Forest: From the Walbran to Fairy Creek, What the Forest Needs, Our Heart Needs
The body of artwork forest! was inspired by my aunt, Dr. Manoarma Savur, an environmental sociologist, then at the University of Bombay (now Mumbai). Dr. Savur published a two-volume book which details the fieldwork she did in the 1980s on the destruction of the bamboo forests in India.
The Reading Room, located within the forest documents installation, contains documents and publications that:
1. I became aware of through the research,
2. That arose as the forest! body of work took shape from 2016 through 2025, with research support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for the Elastic Spaces interdisciplinary working group.
The Reading Room provides places for exploration within the installation, ranging from: background on the project’s process and development; oral histories; scientific papers; children’s books based on primatology research in Japanese forests; to documents from the Rainforest Flying Squad’s work in the Fairy Creek protests starting in 2020.
In brief, the Reading Room includes the documents and publications from people, who as the project’s Technical Director Jorge Zavagno says, “we met along the way.” I include the voices of Nancy Tousley and Haema Sivanesan, who have written about the forest! body of work, the Elastic Spaces researchers, including John Latour, and the forest ecologies researchers working with us, including Nancy Turner, Sarah Turner, Suzanne Simard, and Rita Wong.
I also chose a number of oral histories that were part of our research to give readers opportunities to explore the range and ways of moving the spoken word onto the pages of a book. Publications from Joe Martin with Alan Hoover, Ruby Peter with Helen Demers, August Jack Khahtsahlano with J.S. Matthews, and Roy Kiyooka with his mother Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka and editor Daphne Marlatt informed the approach by the Elastic Spaces Press team to Elder Bill Jones’ Chronicles of the Forest chapbook. I am very grateful to John Latour for this collaboration on this Reading Room.
August 2025
Leila Sujir