During the residency, Nele Möller wants to further develop her research on mimicry, game-calling instruments, and listening practices, which is part of the wider research project, “The Forest Echoes Back,” at LUCA School of Arts Brussels and KU Leuven. In the project, she tunes into the past and present development, as well as the ecological impact, of the spruce monoculture dominating the Thuringian Forest in Germany, using field recording and listening as the central methodologies.

While working together with a hunter in the forest she got to know ‘game-calling’, a millennia-old tradition within hunting communities. Listening to the hunter explaining the practice of game-calling, in which he uses special instruments that mimic animal calls to lure the animals closer to him, she was genuinely surprised by the immense knowledge within the hunting community on how animals communicate with each other and the meaning of various signs within the forest ecology – knowledge, she thought, which is no longer present within Central Europe. However, game-calling instruments have been used by various cultures from many thousand years ago untill today, and are even considered to be the first instruments built by humans. Listening to the hunter imitating the shrieking alarm call of the deer or the familiar coo of a wood pigeon, she started to wonder how to use these instruments beyond tricking animals to tune into the resonances of animal voices, hushing leaves, whispering winds and inevitable environmental collapse.

Could the deliberate fakery of more-than-human sound attend to ecological matters?

The affirmative potential of mimesis lies in its inaccuracy and the resulting destabilisation of identity. The aim is to make vulnerable versions of the real. It is not a striving toward truth or authenticity but a practice that amplifies the fragility of so-called ‘knowledge’. As Mark Peter Wright (2022) writes in Listening After Nature, ‘mimicry could be a method for facing the ghosts of the Anthropocene and a persuasive reminder of the imaginative force of listening’.

Wright, Mark P., Listening After Nature. Bloomsbury Academic, London. 2022. p. 69

Nele Möller (she/her) is a Brussels-based artist working primarily in sound, performance and writing. Her research-based practice focuses on forest conversations, historical nature inscriptions, critical field recording and listening practices. Currently, she is working towards a PhD in the Arts at KU Leuven and LUCA School of Arts Brussels. Her research project ‘The Forest Echoes Back‘ is embedded in the artistic research cluster ‘deep histories fragile memories‘ and oscillates around the Thuringian Forest in Germany, which is severely impacted by climate change and an adherent bark beetle infestation. Since 2023, she has been producing ‘Listening Fields’ at the free radio station Radio Panik in Brussels. Besides that, she performs under the pseudonym Kimberly Clark and has released recordings on Futura Resistenza and RDS Rec.