A fully immersive video installation by experiential artist collective Marshmallow Laser Feast (MLF) will bring the beauty and brilliance of the Colombian Amazon to Compton Verney in 2025.

Breathing with the Forest - an immersive, large-scale video installation - incorporates three screens that will transform Compton Verney’s iconic Adam Hall into a living and breathing (quite literally) experience for two months, where visitors can move freely around the space and observe the life cycle of the Amazon rainforest - from forest floor to tree canopy and beyond.

Focused on the ecosystem surrounding a capinuri tree (Maquira coriacea), Breathing with the Forest recreates a plot of real forest. Surrounded by the rainforest’s pulsing rhythms, visitors can synchronise their breath by following a series of audiovisual cues born of the forest, connecting the inside space with the natural world.

It aims to inspire an affecting and soul-searching experience for adults and children alike as winter turns to spring in Compton Verney’s 120 acres of parkland, bringing the outside in by connecting art and nature.

Indigenous to the Amazon, the capinuri tree grows up to 150 ft high, breaching the canopy of the rainforest. An integral part of the ecosystem, they provide the habitat for the innumerable plants and animals that find shelter and nourishment below. Visitors will be able to get a sense of the scale of the capinuri tree on the near 5-meter screens that cover the walls, where white seed pods glide across in their beautiful natural forms.

The trees are part of the life cycles that make the Amazon the “lungs of the planet”. The rainforest produces a huge proportion of the world’s oxygen and supplies the oceans with one-fifth of the planet’s freshwater every day. It fuels the movement of tropical air pressure that affect weather systems around the globe.

Through audio visual cues visitors will tune in to the real sounds of the Amazon and breathe along with the forest in five-second pulses. Audiences will observe the intricate flow of carbon, water and oxygen from the forest floor all the way up to the tree canopy and beyond, into the air. The artwork allows for a physical reminder that humans give the world carbon dioxide, and in return nature gives us oxygen.

An important Amazonian journey will be conveyed through a digitised rendering of the forest’s network of mycorrhiza – the symbiotic association between plant roots and fungi. Taking viewers into the hidden pathways buried in the soil, a network millions of years old will be revealed as water, nutrients and chemical signals are transferred from plant to plant, defending against pathogens and toxins.

Unfortunately, tropical and subtropical forests are in danger. Across South America, faced with warming temperatures, the trees are on the move. Migrating upwards for cooler altitudes where saplings have a greater shot at survival, changes in the forest composition are already being seen such as heat-loving plants taking the place of other species. This disruption to long-established ecosystems could be devastating.

This is one of the reasons why Marshmallow Laser Feast (consisting of creative directors Robin McNicholas, Ersin Han Ersin and Barney Steel) has created this experiential artwork. The art collective’s work, which is a meeting of science, art and technology, has been exhibited internationally; from the Lisbon Triennial to the Sundance Film Festival, with the aim to interrogate our relationship with the world around us and allow us to navigate with new sensory perceptions.

In 2020 they travelled to Brazil to conduct field recordings, lidar scans and collect a massive amount of data. This resulted in the unique triptych that now brings the sights, sounds and senses of the rainforest to Compton Verney in astounding detail. By recreating a real plot of the Amazon (4°2'39.15"S -70°5'2.45"W), the beauty and fragility of the area is explored and experienced, allowing visitors to reflect and meditate on the natural world.
By connecting us back to the breathing beauty of the Amazon, this immersive work will look towards a hopeful future where our relationship with the environment can be repaired and renewed.