AF’s Shinrin Yoku is a graveyard for lonely trees

Chains, cables, and usual human entertaiment have this faux-forest appearing like a zoo for captive plants

Studio SLA have returned to Århus Festuge this year with a 600 meter-long Shinrin Yoku or ‘forest bath’ bridging Århus Ø’s urban development with some badly needed greenery.

If you’re in the area and can’t quite recognise the foliage, keep walking toward Ø’s signature iceberg look-out and you’ll catch glimpses of confused visitors and damp potato sacks full of soil, likening gravestones for the bodies of tortured trees.

As if the scene wasn’t absurd enough, morning yoga classes take place at kl. 8 where you can close your eyes and meditate to the sounds of tractors, cars and construction from every direction.

Every 30 minutes, a picturesque mist will ooze from the collars of each tree as they sway melancholically in the wind, failing to fall from the harnesses that secure their roots forcefully into the ground. Volunteer workers will come to switch the mist-machine off after you’ve taken your Instgram story, veiling the obnoxious pipes and chords with a vaguely similar plastic camo wrap.

SLA, whose success includes Copenhagen’s Amager Resource Center-turned ski slope have generously offered the trees to Århus’s largest ‘Ghetto’ neighbourhood, Gellerupparken, where the plants will stay permanently in yet another underdeveloped construction site. Maybe by then you will be able to find wifi connection and charging stations between the trees.

Buon Zen.

Words and photos by Elke Numeyer-Windshuttle