Kfir Mualem
Images and Writing by Kfir Mualem
About the Artist:
Kfir an independent filmmaker and photographer based in Jaffa. Focusing his work on identity and consciousness under the environmental and social struggles of our times. He spent the last years following anarchist collectives and movements around Europe, examining social experiments, putting daring and radical ideas to the test of reality and prospect of a new society, of changing the way we view the world and each other.
About the Project: Dannenröder Forest
As summer becomes winter, Dannenroder forest occupation shifts between the creation of anarchist community life to an epic war against the cutting of the forest, threatened to become a highway.
I flew to Croatia because it was the only place possible. My genius plan was to sneak into Europe by bus. Somehow it worked, and despite increasing anxiety attacks, I crossed all of Europe to reach a forest in the middle of Germany.
I entered the forest and started seeing tree houses and familiar faces, Some I had filmed in another forest, in another struggle, in the two years leading up to this moment. I searched for Nirgendwo, which is nowhere in German; it's the barrio where she lived. It's often said that if you go nowhere, it doesn't matter what path you take, but my hurtful heart led me to this road, through this forest, on the romantic path I built in my head, the path to her.
But reality had other ways. She was living there with someone else, she was completely broken, and she hated me for leaving her at the moment she lost the most precious thing to her. She wouldn't let herself get close to me. Her house was the tallest of the forest, 27 meters above the ground. I have a fear of heights.
Despite my pain, I couldn't leave. I left the filmmaker - journalist's pretense of which people in the forest knew me for and I became part of the nowhere community, a community that included some of the most amazing people I’ve met. Life in the forest is quite remarkable, the slowness of life alongside the trees and animals, without thinking of how you look and where you come from, without dependence on money or status. Tree houses taken from fairytale, construction methods at heights and the art of Improvisation with what you find.
Meanwhile, the police eviction began and turned into a war stretched over weeks, an epic battle involving tens of thousands of people. Summer turned into autumn, turned into winter, a bleeding love story, an anarchist community, and a war to the last branch.
