Drifting Woods, is a filmic work that connects with the local histories of a dense forestland, two hours north of Stockholm. There has been forest in this area as long as there are records of it, and only in the last 250 years has it been used more expansively for industrial production. In Drifting Woods, the drift of the productive forest is being registered, in retracing the movements of the industrial forest, from the forest commons, through its privatization, from its use in the iron ore industry to a forestry industry. In a non-linear composition, the different stages of the plantation are brought forward, from the planting, to fabrication of saplings, the different stages of felling, into the production of paper pulp and saw wood. The work registers how the forest is recorded and continuously represented: in scientific experiments, through data collections, by botanists and in a retelling of the area’s history. The capitalization of forests is interlinked with territorialization charted through mapping technology. The film transmits histories of both local and migratory positions. The work engages with biologists to get a closer understanding of tree life and how it interconnects with the underground mycelium, in what the biologist Suzanne Simard refers to as network topologies. Drifting Woods, is also that, a network topology connecting the forest and the tales inhabiting it. Listening to the stories of this network is also hearing how the forest is told and that its future is dependent on how the stories of the forest are retold within a wider narrative.
With this work Rönicke is suggesting that even though the production of forests are threatening to make the forest into a desert altogether, other potentials are also present, in lineage with rooted time scapes of the same forest.
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