The arts and cultural practice provide a compelling route into understanding how people are connected to landscapes. The Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme (ELSP) Artists in Residence are exploring the relationships that exist between nature, people, and landscape, helping to understand and express how communities connect to the places where they live, work and play.
One of the ELSP Artist Residencies was awarded to Romanian born music producer and DJ Nico de Transilvania, also founder of non-profit Forests Without Frontiers. Nico grew up close to the forests of the Carpathian Mountains, where an ELSP-funded Restoration Landscape project is based. Providing habitats for Europe’s largest populations of brown bears, wolves and lynxes, these mountains are as beautiful as they are essential to life.
Through collaboration with the communities of Făgăraș villages (a mountain range within the Carpathians), Nico is exploring how the biodiversity of these mountains are interconnected with local traditions. She is particularly interested in giving voice to elders from Romanian forest communities, since their traditional music centres around human connections with natural cycles. Some of her earliest memories are singing with her grandma near the forest where she spent her childhood. Living in communion with nature, the songs they sang were about the natural world, about longing for connection with nature, and love.
Building relationships with members of the community has been a focus for Nico. One important and special friendship which has developed is with an elder of Nucsoara, Silvia Dan, who sings at the local church. Through recording, and therefore bringing attention to, Silvia and the church choir, has brought a new sense of pride in their music and costume heritage of the area. It has also deepened Nico’s connection to the natural landscape even more.
Along with some of the other ELSP residencies, artists often act as a bridge or catalyst, to bring different groups of people together, open up conversations around conservation, and change preconceptions. With Nico’s project, music is bringing together different generations and celebrating the connections between living with nature and their shared cultural heritage.
Nico’s recordings of traditional Romanian songs and forest soundscapes will be combined with newelectronic sounds, and will come together in an album which will be premiered at the Romanian Cultural Institute in London in September.
This artistic project will be dedicated to the memory of Nicoleta’s mum, Ileana, and David Alexander Yeoman one of the co-producers, both of whom sadly passed away recently.
All images: Nico de Transilvania and Marius Sumlea, 2021/22
The ELSP Artist Residencies are a collaboration between the Endangered Landscapes & Seascapes Programme and the CCI Arts, Science and Conservation Programme. To find out more about the project in this article, please visit the Carpathian Mountains Artist Residency project page.
