Note 2: Life / Signs

In a tropical rainforest, durian trees are often a tell-tale sign of the proximities of bats. Twines and branches point to possible simian superhighways. While holes in the ground suggest the presence of wild boars. Semiotically, if we were to expand upon the notion of selfhood by explaining life as a sign process, then as anthropologist Eduardo Kohn contends, forests are in fact an “ecology of selves”.

Then to answer the question posited by the title of this text and project, forests do indeed talk all the time; amongst its other-than-human inhabitants, within and out of itself, and to us.

And like the most contentious pockets of the Internet, here at the equatorial rainforests (more than anywhere else) the volume and complexity of the chatter is tuned up to the nth degree. How then have we managed to tune so much of it out?