This year, we completed our second field trip to the Mount Lumut forests near Berong village, North Barito, Central Kalimantan — home to the Dayak Taboyan, an Indigenous community deeply connected to the forest that sustains them.
In collaboration with the Borneo Nature Foundation and Muhammadiyah University Palangkaraya, and with the support and guidance of the Berong community, we conducted two field trips in August 2024 and June 2025. Across these visits, we gathered 24-hour sound recordings from multiple forest locations, capturing the rhythms and voices of this living ecosystem.
After each expedition, the community gathered for collective listening sessions, sharing memories, stories, and reflections that revealed how the sounds of the forest echo through ancestral knowledge and local mythology. These moments of exchange continue to shape how we understand listening — not only as an artistic act, but as a way of being in relation.
We are now transforming our film material into a feature-length documentary, weaving together sound, image, and community narratives. A short excerpt from our 2024 trip is available to preview on this site.
In August 2025, we shared early excerpts of this ongoing work at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul. Presented in the museum’s lobby as part of the performative sound installation HUTAN, the screening offered audiences a glimpse into the evolving dialogue between forest, sound, and community.
The field trips are part of a the research project, titled ‘Reflections on the History of Sound and Listening’, funded by the German Federal Foreign Office as part of its cultural preservation program.
