Yinka Esi Graves & Miguel Ángel Rosales The Forest Seville (Spain), London (UK)

Filmed in the Sierra Norte of Seville, Spain, The Forest imagines a place of refuge for those seeking freedom from oppression. Through movement and landscape, Yinka Esi Graves and Miguel Ángel Rosales create a powerful meditation on resistance, survival and the enduring presence of histories that are often overlooked. 

Part of The Disappearing Act: a series of site-responsive interventions, the films emerge from Graves’ exploration of places shaped by colonial discourse. Each one responds to landscapes that hold traces of brutal displacement and erasure, yet often bear few visible signs of the histories they contain.

Through movement, Graves investigates questions of presence, absence and visibility, developing a distinctive choreographic language in dialogue with each site. Rosales’ camera captures these encounters, creating intimate and evocative works that bring body, memory and place into conversation.

Presented together, each film reflects a unique meeting between performer and landscape, revealing how histories can linger within spaces, and how dance can become a way of witnessing, remembering and reimagining what has been obscured.