What a wonderful weekend in the Catalan Pyrenees for the Dansàneu festival! The landscape, the sounds, the performances filling the air – just incredible. I felt hugely privileged to have ‘Outside, Inside the Forest’ screened in the Sant Esteve church in the village of Gavàs.
To be there in person, present the work and connect with the audience made it all the more special.
The video artwork, created in 2019, was selected as one of the winning works of the Materia Bosque Award 2026, curated by Isabel Ferreira (LABEA) and will continue its journey through screenings at various festivals. Huge thanks to all at Labea and Dansàneu.
I had a lovely chat with Bernat Puigtobella from Núvol digital cultural newspaper about the work.
(Translated from Catalan original)
“For her part, Sarah Misselbrook, an English artist living in Riba-roja and quite active in festivals in our country, has presented a striking video recorded on the same farm where she lives near the border with Aragon. In this video, entitled ‘Outside, Inside the Forest’, the artist delivers a speech aloud that is a cry for help from a person lost in the forest and without coverage, who addresses a hypothetical listener by throwing her cry into the empty immensity. The video, recorded in 2019, is recorded with a static camera that makes the woman’s speech even more desolate, which we see as a stray dot on a rock, in the distance, between greenery and rocks. Misselbrook plays the role of a woman who wonders if anyone can hear her or if her lonely voice precisely feels better and has more impact if we listen to it from a distance. Recorded after Brexit, the artist embodies the exacerbated cry of a person who feels on the outskirts and at the same time inside the forest, feels non-native, uprooted, distantly untamed, wild, exotic, untamable and at the same time very vulnerable. It is the cry of a human being victim of incommunication who is unable to establish a bond with her neighbour because she feels inaccessible. A chilling monologue.”The full article can be read on this link.
