Caroline Barneaud and Stefan Kaegi are co-authors of the Shared Landscapes project, which, after high-profile performances in Switzerland, France, Germany, Austria and Italy, came to life in Slovenia at the end of August. Their concept brings together seven performances between fields and forests, created by artists from different countries. "What if the landscape were a theater?" they ask together with them and, of course, the spectators, who lined up in Koseški boršt on the northwestern edge of Ljubljana, as many as 460 of them, over the course of four days.

The team of Bunker, which approached the project as a Slovenian co-producer and presented it as part of the 27th international festival of contemporary stage art Mladi levi, was responsible for the flawless performance. In the invitation, the organizers asked the audience to come to the venue by bicycle or public transport, and then equipped them with headphones and VR helmets, capes and repellants. Seven producers and just as many guides, nine technicians and around ten performers took care of the smooth course of the event. The co-authors of the concept also watched over the general refhearsal and the premiere. For many years, Caroline was the producer of the renowned Avignon festival, and now she is the artistic director of the Vidy theater in Lausanne. She is interested in projects that question contemporary society and develop new performative formats. Very similar is the creative focus of the Swiss-German director Stefan Kaegi, co-founder and member of the Rimini Protokoll collective, within which he develops documentary and curated events in which instead of trained actors, participate experts – people with interesting professions and life experiences. Caroline presented herself at Mladi levi for the first time this year, while Stefan has already performed at the festival with several of hid projects: Cargo Sofia-Ljubljana, Mnemopark, Radio Muezzin and Parallel Cities.

CAROLINE: The most important criterion is definitely that we always choose the first natural environment outside the city center. We are not looking for wilderness, protected areas or spectacular views, but for the kind of landscape that exists in all European cities or on their outskirts. These are the first suburban field and forest areas, areas of transition between the city and the countryside, because in the project we are exploring different ways of coexistence between nature and people.
Another important criterion is that we choose locations that people can access by public transport. For a project that largely deals with the question of how to protect the environment, it would not make sense to organize buses for the transport of spectators or to ask them to drive to the venue in private cars. The third criterion, which we take into account from the very beginning, is that we look for meadows and forests, because parts of the project are designed in such a way that they need them as their setting.

STEFAN: On the one hand, these are locations that are in common public use, as you can visit them even when they are not occupied by our project, and on the other hand, they are also highly regulated areas in which many rules apply. Such spaces always have their owners; most often they are partly private and partly municipal properties, which is regulated in different ways in different countries. In Austria, for example, we implemented the project in an area where we had to obtain as many as thirty consents in advance and negotiate with some owners at length about many aspects of its use.

This is also why it is essential for the project to be undertaken everywhere by an experienced and devoted local production team. How long did the preparations for its Slovenian performance take?

CAROLINE: Since our knowledge of languages and local environments is limited, we have to connect as much as possible with colleagues in individual countries and trust them. Through them we learn new things and include them in our concept. Preparations for the Slovenian version of the project took a good year. The girls from Bunker's team attended his first performance in Lausanne last spring together with the technicians. Immediately after that, the preparations began under the leadership of the local main producer of the project, Maja Vižin. Since the team knew the project well in advance, it was not difficult to move it to Ljubljana and add something characteristic to it. Both location selection and casting went smoothly.

STEFAN: But we ran into an unexpected dilemma when we were thinking about how to translate the title Shared Landscapes into Slovenian. We asked some local residents about this, and especially the elderly told us that the title takes them back to a time they don't really want to remember. It was different with the younger generations, with them there is a need and desire for shared experiences. Viewers communicate with each other everywhere, but in ways that also differ from each other. They mainly show the need for events to be experienced with all of your senses and shared with others at the same time, which, in my opinion, is also a characteristic of the post-pandemic era.

CAROLINE: In terms of location, it was extremely close to the city. Although at first we also considered Barje and Sračja dolina in Črnuče, we finally implemented the project in Koseški boršt. This is a breathtaking forest area with many glades and meadows, which stretches between Rožna dolina and Koseze, and was cut off by Večna pot from the rest of the forest on Rožnik and the Tivoli city park. We used the space between Koseški bajer, which was created after the clay mine was closed two hundred years ago as a result of human intervention in nature, and the city itself, which is really close.

In one of the seven performances of the project created by the Turkish-Belgian contemporary artist Begüm Erciyas and the German filmmaker Daniel Kötter, this was clearly visible. The authors use recording techniques, developed for military purposes to establish a shared experience of no man's land: the viewers put on VR helmets, using them to rise above the tops of nearby trees and view the intertwining of urban and natural surfaces in their surroundings from a bird's-eye view. The effect was similar everywhere, but here the intertwining of the two was even more pronounced than elsewhere.

STEFAN: The concept of this part of the project stipulates in advance that a meteorologist, a forester, a psychotherapist, a singer from abroad and a child participate in it. The conversation among them must be improvised and spontaneous, in accordance with the individual experiences and, last but not least, the characters of the interlocutors, but it also has some pre-prepared cues that occasionally direct and propel it forward.

My co-director here, Tjaša Črnigoj, in cooperation with Maja Vižin, chose brilliant people who took part in the Slovenian version of the conversation: meteorologist and TV weather forecaster Andrej Velkavrh, forester Marija Jakopin, psychoanalyst Lilija Varjačić Rajko, opera singer with Venezuelan origins Diego Barrios Rosso and eleven-year-old schoolgirl Brina Breznik. The latter charmed me with her liveliness and curiosity, with which she redirected and co-created the conversation of adults. Her innocent yet mature insight added much to the effect of the whole.
I was also impressed that the conversation touched on important economic topics affecting Slovenian forests. Marija said that since the sixties of the 20th century, you have legalized natural forest management, while forests in many other places in Europe are nothing more than wood fields, which are planted and cut down by man according to his needs. Ljubljana was also the first place where we listened to female forester, elsewhere this profession was represented by men.

CAROLINE: The location of his farm, which has been around for hundreds of years, is really special. Once it stood in the countryside, but with the expansion of the city, it eventually found itself next to the main road that leads to its center, surrounded by apartment blocks and everything else that establishes Koseze as an integral part of the city. Since Žiga and his wife Brigita cultivate the land and raise livestock in the city, he can be completely independent of existing distribution chains and sell produce to customers right in his farm yard. Within our project, this is a unique case, because in most other countries farmers complained about the produce distribution system.

STEFAN: In this part of the project, Faustine Bas-Defossez, director for nature, health and environment at the European Environment Agency, and ethologist and bioacoustician Fanny Rybak, who do not perform live on the lawn in front of the audience, also speak. In the dialogue, which was led in Slovenia by the performer Nataša Živković, their statements were mediated by the actress Barbara Kukovec.

CAROLINE: For example, within Émilie's performance, we stay on the same meadow for forty minutes. We usually don't last that long in nature even alone, let alone in a group. In this way, we begin to discover to whom nature belongs in the first place, who are its permanent inhabitants, among whom you came as a guest for a short time. I really like this side of the project. In Ljubljana, during this part of the event, we were surrounded by tiny and shiny insects, oak lace bugs.

I looked up because of them and saw that we were actually sitting under a giant oak tree.

CAROLINE: If you go for an ordinary walk in the same area, you probably won't notice everything that individual parts of the Shared Landscapes draw your attention to. The fact that you spend a whole seven hours somewhere contributes a lot to this. During all this time, your attention is focused on the details, you connect with the space and place yourself in it in a different way than if you just walk through it. The duration of the project obliges you to observe everything around you carefully.

In addition to the inhabitants of nature, we also notice each other and establish contacts with each other.

STEFAN: Our point was to encourage people not only to discover, but also to use nature together. We live in a time when everyone tries to discover green areas in their own way, but at the same time, unfortunately, many also close themselves in them. They arrange homes and gardens on them, surround them with high fences and exclude others from them. This is becoming an increasingly serious ecological problem. We think it is important that green spaces on the edges of cities remain shared. In this way, all of us who live in cities will be able to continue to enjoy a break in nature, without needing a weekend in remote corners of nature that are better left untouched.

CAROLINE: The event of Portuguese artists Sofia Dias and Vitor Roriz, which was co-created here by theater and radio director Klemen Markovčič, probably invites the audience to interact most directly. It is a kind of sound journey through the forest, during which the audience stops in a clearing and divides into two groups. They discover both plants and animals as well as other viewers in the immediate surroundings using instructions from the headphones. They touch the trees, browse the earth, pick up branches and cones from the ground, exchange them, touch each other and connect.

So it is not only about nature, but also about how we use it and share it, about the community.

STEFAN: The project tries to establish nature as a common space for connection and cooperation. Of course, nature must be preserved, but we cannot stop using it because of this. Humans are nature too. There is nothing wrong with going for a walk in the nearby forest with our portable technology. Some people are skeptical about our project, saying why do you wear headphones, VR helmets and the like in nature. But we cannot deny progress, we cannot go completely back to the roots.

As Andrej Velkavrh said in my piece, it has been scientifically proven that human corpses today decompose significantly more slowly than in the past, as they are heavily impregnated with various preparates and full of numerous implants and prostheses. We are all mummified to some extent, he joked, and I would add that we are also cyborgs, because we can no longer imagine our everyday life without portable technology. But because of this, we don't have to stay in the virtual world and withdraw into the metaverse, because our bodies are still organic and physically present.

This was pointed out by the event of the Italian choreographers Chiara Bersani and Marco D'Agostino, in which the disabled performer Urša Urbančič performed in front of a painted canvas in the forest, and spoke to the audience about her love for nature.

CAROLINE: Urša was really amazing. Chiara met her last year, when she was performing at the Mladi levi festival. At one point during the performance, a couple of volunteers joined her on stage, and among them was Urša. I also think this part of the project is touching. On the one hand, it points to the fragility of man, but on the other hand, Urša also radiates incredible strength in him. As it ends with a picnic where spectators are served tea and biscuits, the event also has bonding potential. This is actually part of the project, during which the viewers begin to spontaneously socialize.

The connecting element and at the same time the musical red thread of the project is the four-part score by the American composer Ari Benjamin Meyers. Spectators encounter the musicians on their way from one venue to another, and the project ends with their joint performance.

STEFAN: I was very pleased with the choice of young musicians who performed his score in Ljubljana. It is a musical tribute to the green areas that we choose as venues and are actually the protagonist of the project. In Ljubljana, the woodwind sextet led by conductor Karim Zajac played to the trees, which were very tall compared to France or Portugal, to the luxurious ferns and grasses that defied the August heat, and last but not least to the birds that could be seen throughout the journey to hear and nicely complemented this sound intervention.

What kind of landscape shaped your relationship with nature, did you grow up in a village or in a city?

CAROLINE: I could say that I grew up more in a rural than an urban environment.

STEFAN: I'm from Solothurn, a small town and the seat of the canton of the same name in Switzerland. The landscape in which I grew up is not very different from the one I am discovering here. I don't think it's strange that many people compared Slovenia to Switzerland before me. What they have in common is the proximity of the mountains, which you can see and are constantly aware of, even if you live in the middle of the city. When I moved to Berlin, the lack of this element made it seem flat and barren for a long time. I missed the presence of the mountains on the horizon because that's just something I grew up with and was used to.

Due to climate change, today's youth are rightly concerned about the future of the planet and the survival of the human species on it. The event designed by the Spanish collective El Conde de Torrifiel addresses this concern most directly. Lying down on the lawn, we read from the screen the address of nature, which is also very direct and critical of man's treatment of it in places.

CAROLINE: If I compare my generation to today's young people, we didn't really have to deal with the consequences of human intervention in nature as much. I'm not saying they didn't exist, but they were definitely less visible and worrisome. This last part of the project is a call to think about what kind of nature we want and what we are able and willing to do for it.

Does the project also have the promise of an epilogue that will connect the different environments in which it was carried out?

CAROLINE: That would be interesting because the project actually connects different landscapes. It is exciting to see how different cultures and languages line up in it, however, in addition to the differences, there are also certain constants that mainly concern nature as its environment. For example, it would be easy to create a network of all the landscapes that have so far been included in the project in individual countries.

STEFAN: Or maybe we could hold a convention of all the local farmers, preferably together with all the participating tractors (laughter). Farmers have brought various tractors to the project so far. Some were already old and dilapidated, while others were very hi-tech, for example in Germany.

CAROLINE: Yes, we could design the closing event. Two weeks ago, we already talked with Émilie Rousset the director of the piece about the fact that we should finally bring all the farmers together, this would be an interesting conclusion to the project.

STEFAN: We could compare their attitudes towards the agricultural and environmental policy of the European Union, as well as their experiences with how they are implemented in practice in individual countries.

Perhaps something surprised you in Slovenia, or did you miss something compared to other environments?

STEFAN: What I missed was that none of the participants said anything about bees. I think this is a shame considering that I know how important beekeeping is in Slovenia. I expected someone to speak about this industry, but in the end it didn't happen anyway.

CAROLINE: Oh, there were a lot of things I didn't expect. But this is the beauty of Shared Landscapes: in each new environment I also discover new dimensions of this complex project. Time and time again, I find that the effort we put into it, together with local co-producers and other collaborators, pays off handsomely. This is clearly visible on the faces of people leaving the scenery.