For the third episode of the Ink Roads podcast, I’m honored to feature Julia Adzuki. Julia is the creator of centerforresonance.substack.com, which chronicles her journey homesteading in a forest in Sweden and is full of lush poetry and deeply rooted ecological wisdom.
There, she and her family are building a center for artists to create somatic, creative, and relational art-make that deepens their — and humanity’s — connections to the natural world and all beings.
Julia and her partner Patrick Dallard are also the founders of SymbioLab, a touring laboratory for art that explores interconnectedness and relationality, and Ljudtornet, an experimental sound and art platform that hosts an annual festival. Julia’s work traverses poetry, fiction, song, spirituality, and so much more, and weaves a rich, beautiful tapestry that addresses climate change and the environmental crisis through creativity and ritual.
I loved this conversation and am so honored to have had Julia on the podcast. Thanks for listening, reading, and being here.
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INK ROADS: Thank you so much for being willing to chat. I'm super inspired by your whole project and your Substack, and I've just been so curious about the amazing-sounding, really powerful work that you're doing. So I'd love it if you could just introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your Substack and where you're based and just guide us into your world a little bit.
JULIA ADZUKI: Yeah. Thank you. Well, thanks for the invitation, Eden. Yeah, I can tell you a bit about where I am to begin with. I'm sitting in a yurt in the forest in Sweden, a little bit south of Stockholm, near a town called Yanaa. I live here with my partner, our family, and our daughter. We're in the process of gradually building a Center for Artists in Resonance.
We are artists ourselves, working often with resonance in different forms. Part of that includes working with tactile sound instruments, but then it’s really extended to working with resonance in a very broad sense, in particular working with ecological resonance—with resonance with place and the forest that we live in. So that's kind of the root of it, of what we're up to here. We're living off-grid, and our buildings are also planned as off-grid buildings. We're really enjoying this shift of lifestyle.
IR: Sounds super powerful. I love the name—the term "resonance" just reminds me of sound waves and echoes. So Artists in Resonance is a place—it's meant to be a place where artists can come to work with ecology and nature, right?
JA: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. So our intention is to be able to host artists, ecologists, and eco-psychologists and to be a place where people can come together to have artistic and research processes situated in the forest—particular to the forest, most likely. That's the field that we are interested in, and we'd love to support that and see more collaborations and support the actual development of works.
IR: Definitely. It's a very beautiful and timely mission, I think, for today. I'd love to hear a little bit more about what kind of work you hope to see happening there. You said eco-psychologists, eco-artists—what kind of projects are you hoping to support and bring into being there?
JA: That's a good question. I mean, I guess in some way we haven't imagined what kind of projects in any detail, because I guess there's a hope that the projects are beyond our wildest imaginings. We're busy with our own practices and connecting with a wide network of people doing very interesting things. Yeah, it's a good question. I guess the core of it is to support a deepening relation with our human selves and our natural or more-than-human surroundings and co-inhabitants of Earth. So that can take any kind of shape. And we're really interested in all aspects of that, from spiritual ecology to eco-psychology to ecology itself, and in all the ways that artistic practice can engage with listening and finding new, or finding old, ways of being with.
In a roundabout way, maybe I answered your question. But I guess we haven't imagined anything specific, but there's a warmth and openness to what might come our way.
IR: Sounds more like creating a canvas to dream into. And I love that you mentioned finding new ways but also very old ways. I think a lot of these Earth-based practices are things people have been doing for a long time, and plenty of people still are. But then plenty of us are so separated from that. And I do see art as kind of a way of bridging that divide.
Could you just tell me a little bit about your own story? What led you to this work? How did you find your way here?
JA: It's a good question. I mean, probably really fundamental to what I do now is grounded in my childhood experiences of being in the bush in Australia. I guess all of my life-shaping experiences were somehow in the bush, by the sea, all in natural places. So, yeah, I guess I had some kind of knowing that even in working with art, it would be somehow ecology-related or related to places. And I already had an inkling back then that I'd like to live off-grid, and then I forgot about that for a long time.
But I had some really formative experiences in the temperate rainforest when I lived in Tasmania as a young adult. It's very hard to put them into words, but something shook me there. And I guess I opened a dialogue with the forest directly somehow. I think that really shifted things for me.
Then I found my way to Sweden—accidentally. I'd heard there was a place where they made a hotel out of ice and snow, and I was really into making sculptures that melted. So I found my way to Sweden and ended up working at the Ice Hotel, and I had the opportunity to be on this incredible frozen Torne River, sculpting tons of ice and snow, and really being in a dialogue then with water.
So I guess I've always been after these immersive experiences that are really founded in something relational, whether it's with natural materials, places, landscapes, or even working with people. I guess the relational has always been a driving curiosity in all of this.
IR: Yeah. Just creating that connection to something more than ourselves, I think, is such a deep human need. And I love that you express developing a dialogue or getting some messages from or connection to the forest. I've had some experiences like that as well. And yeah, I think when we open ourselves to that more-than-human intelligence, a lot can come through.
How do you think people can open themselves up to the messages of the land? Especially maybe people who aren't living off-grid? If you have any suggestions for how to start that dialogue?
JA: Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, in a way, it's really extremely simple, and the simplest things can be really hard. But just being and listening, I guess, is what I would suggest, and what I practice myself. It's so easy to be so busy all the time, but just taking time to sit with and listen to a place is, I think, the most powerful practice I know.
IR: Listening.
JA: Yeah. And I mean listening with all of the senses as well. Yeah. Listening with physicality—with touch, with taste, with smell, and all these ways of being. Becoming receptive, really.
And that can be a challenge for us when we're, you know, all busy with our phones and our things to do and running around. But I think it's the most helpful way to slow down as well. And yeah, it's like shifting into another time zone in a way. Things find a different pace.
IR: Like heading into that sort of deep time or ecological time—where it's not just one lifetime, you know?
JA: Absolutely. Yeah.
IR: And I think it's interesting, like, we live in a world so kind of... the human world is so guided by time, like every minute, and we're always disconnecting or numbing out in some way. And I do think presence can also come with challenges too. Which is why, you know, if it was easy, everybody would probably do it.
I'm wondering how ecological grief fits into your practice and vision. I know you write a lot about ecological grief and things like that, and I know that can come up and has come up for me when engaging with the natural world. I'm wondering if you could kind of speak to your relationship to that and how that fits into your practice and vision.
JA: Yeah, I guess ecological grief is something I feel and have felt for a very long time. My whole life, really. It's so very present. And I think for more and more of us, it's becoming extremely present. And I'm aware that that can somehow make one want to shield oneself from the natural world, that it can be confronting to see things, to take that in and all that it means.
But yeah, I personally find it very powerful to give that grief a space and a voice, especially as it becomes more and more present. I find that when I'm not addressing it or when it feels too much, you know, we have coping mechanisms, so we turn the other way or kind of ignore it, but I think that binds up a whole lot of energy that gets a bit blocked or is not accessible.
So I've certainly felt a huge relief in beginning to work with ecological grief, that something I'd been holding at bay for quite some time now could move. And I had access to a whole lot of energy in myself that I didn't before, somehow.
But of course, this comes with challenges because, as a culture, we're not particularly good at addressing grief in general. I mean, you know, we have rituals around humans dying and loved ones. And those are different for everybody. But even there, we're a little bit poor when it comes to addressing grief.
So how do we address a kind of grief that we don't really have a cultural context for in a way, or definitely not on the scale of ecological grief that's present today? I find this a really interesting question and something interesting to grapple with in artistic practice. And I mean, in the ways that I do it, it's in very small ways, but it’s just beginning to experiment with myself and in artistic projects with small groups to actually give this grief a space and let it move, and to trust the agency of the grief in a way.
I know with grief there can often be a hesitation that perhaps it will take us over. Or, especially with ecological grief, perhaps because there is no foreseeable end to it, we could say that we can only anticipate that it might just grow. So if we open up to that, is it going to swallow us whole? Will we get lost in it?
But I have found, on the other hand, that to begin to engage with that grief consciously—and by consciously, what do I mean? By having an intentionality around it, by having witnesses for the grieving process, and by moving things into actions or meditations.
I guess I've learned quite a lot through my experiences with the Karelian lament tradition, which is from Karelia in the east of Finland, partly in Russia. The Karelian and Ingrian lament tradition was a dying tradition in Finland but is now considered revived.
My lament teacher, Thomas Ranakari, was one of a few people who have revived this tradition and kind of found a modern form in a way, teaching this in a workshop setting. What's very strong in this tradition is that the lament needs to be witnessed—that if it's witnessed by other people, we hold the space for the lamenter, and that creates a kind of container.
I've also conducted or made laments in the forest where I invite the trees to be my witness. And witnesses could mean—it could be a photo of somebody you love, even. It doesn’t have to be a person, but just someone or a being that will look lovingly upon you so you're in some way held, so you're not a ship just out to sea.
So that's a really, I think, very important part of giving this grief space: Having witnesses and really consciously grounding yourself. Feeling your physical connection to the ground, feeling the support that's there.
What I found surprising is that grief, when I enter it, hasn't swallowed me at all. I find that grief in itself has such an intelligence and agency somehow. Once that energy starts to move—or at least for myself, I could say the reason why I find myself here now, living in a yurt off-grid in the forest, making this project around artists in resonance, I think, has a lot to do with how I really dared to meet that ecological grief. And that opened an incredibly surprising path of works, projects, and life ways that perhaps I wouldn't have found otherwise.
It just became kind of essential that I took these steps. But I'm waffling on. You can ask me a question or guide me if I'm going off track.
IR: Well, this is incredibly powerful. You're definitely welcome to waffle if you want. There are so many jewels of wisdom in there. So, yeah, I mean, there are so many pieces that I'd love to hear more about.
I love that you invoked working with the lament tradition—going to older grieving traditions that are rooted in landscapes. I think Indigenous wisdom can teach us so much, especially when it comes to ecological work. People have walked these pathways before—people who have lost massive amounts—and they’ve found ways to carry loss.
And I love that you mentioned witnessing, either being witnessed by others or by nature. It’s a powerful testimony to just the need for live performance and sharing art in addition to just creating it in a vacuum. So yeah, so many insights.
JA: I mean, I'm thinking about the context of, you know, we're sharing here via Substack, and perhaps a lot of other writers or people who love words listen to this. An interesting thing to mention in the Karelian lament tradition is that it's really poetry. So it begins with poetry that is then sung as a lament.
The way I see the lament process through this tradition and how I've woven it into my work, there are kind of three transformations, in a way.
The first one is from that sense of grief, whatever it is—and, I mean, you can make a lament of gratitude, you know. The whole spectrum of emotion is welcome.
But from that feeling sense, the first transformation is into poetic language. And I think a beautiful example from the Karelian tradition is, for example, if you were going to lament your mother, you would never say "your mother." You would say "the one who carried you." So there’s this finding of the poetic turn.
And then the next transformation, or key, is giving it voice and being witnessed—the witnesses holding the circle, or the forest, or whoever you invite to be a witness just singing those words. And maybe other words come in the process. Maybe a cry comes, maybe sounds come. But the beautiful thing about lament is that there’s no right or wrong sound. It’s absolutely not important that it sounds like a nice singing voice. You can really let it rip. There can be all kinds of sounds.
And then there's the grounding, and the connection with the ground in all of this.And I feel like these are three keys that really help to transform the grief. I’m not talking about making a lament and it’s done, especially if we’re talking about ecological grief. But somehow, giving voice and being held can transform something, can free some energy that’s otherwise held tight by this grief, can open it to something else.
So even if you still carry that grief, even if you know the destruction is still happening or has still happened, perhaps something in yourself can bud into a new possibility through that process. At least, that's how I've experienced it.
IR: I definitely feel a lot of resonance with what you're discussing now. I’ve been kind of called to the idea of singing or poetry as a way to channel ecological grief or channel some of the earth's voice.
A dog is next to me, if you hear her. She’s a little stressed. But yeah, she knows more about what’s going on in the world than most of us, I think.
But yeah, I feel so much resonance with what you're saying. It feels like something I’ve felt really called to. So I would just love to hear as much as you want to speak to that concept or adjacent concepts. I’m super open to hearing about it.
I can totally imagine that being a powerful group ritual as well as an individual ritual. It sounds kind of aligned with therapeutic contexts— like group ecological art workshops that work with the same principle. It just feels like very rich soil to dive into, I’ll say.
JA: Yeah. I wasn't thinking about that consciously. But of course, you're a singer. I mean, I could tell a little bit about a lament project that I've been working on with a mixed group of artists, activists, and academics in Lutruwita, Tasmania.
So this is also the forest I mentioned earlier where I had some really formative experiences. And in that process, I kind of, well, not kind of. I made a promise to that forest, and forgot about it for nearly 20 years and then suddenly remembered, and something activated.
So it's the temperate rainforest in the Styx Valley where logging of the most incredible old-growth forest is still going on. It was stopped temporarily, and there's been decades of protests, but it's still going on. And I'd had a vision, you know, 20 years earlier of making an art project, a collective art project, in the clear-felled, burnt forest.
This forest is burnt after it's felled to prepare for making a monoculture, basically, to kill off a lot of species. So I started this project in 2019 and continued in 2023. And we were a group of 17 people who explored somatic movement and listening and sounding practices as an art project, and made a lament for this forest that had been felled.
A lot of the people involved in this, like myself, had been protesting in these forests earlier. In activism, you know, if a forest is felled, then you move on to try and save the next forest. But I really felt this pull to not just look away from the forest that had been felled.
So yeah, we spent many days there exploring somatic movement and doing some deep listening practices from Pauline Oliveros, the composer. I don't know if you know of her work, but she has some wonderful scores that we kind of opened our lament with—very beautiful, approachable ways to sound together with people who don’t consider themselves singers or musicians, but to really open the voice, which felt very important to do there.
So we made laments on these massive tree stumps where we could be 17 people sitting in a circle or standing in a circle. They're so huge. And that was just an intuitive process. To write songs about places that have been destroyed by humans. We just found ways together and documented it in a film. We did things like a very slow walk on a long logging road that ends in total destruction, just to be with things slowly and feel the presence of the place.
I had a couple of questions going in. It was like, does the fallen forest still resonate? And how do we practice the rights—the legal rights—and the rites—the ceremonial rites—of this place?
Another thing we did was we carried a really large, hollow, burnt musk daisy bush down the logging road as if we were carrying a loved one who had died. It was a very powerful experience to dare to step into the unknown with this group. And there was a lot of very beautiful sharing happening. We didn’t lament as such in words, but we very almost did.
This was just before I started learning with Tuomas Rounakari from the Karelian lament tradition. But it was just on the tip of our tongues. And I think, in a way, it’s probably on the tip of many, many of our tongues now—the lament.
There, we had a spontaneous circle sitting on this stump, and each expressed what it was we felt. And there was everything there from rage to peace. It was the most poetic conversation I think I’ve ever been part of. And I think we were—it was almost a song.
But now, since then, I’ve understood that what can be useful is to just, you know, give that little nudge that brings things into song. How powerful that can be. That can move things. I mean, maybe that’s something you, as a singer and songwriter, must experience—what happens, that transformation from words on a page or words that are spoken into words that are sung. It’s a different thing. How do you feel that?
IR: I think, to me, it feels like some stories want to be expressed in song. And others—like, I also write poetry, and—but song has been… What I love about songwriting, one of the things more than anything, is that it’s so easy to share, and it’s so communal. And it’s so connective. Poetry can be as well, for sure, but not in the same way that songs can kind of cut through divides between people and really open people up.
I think it can happen with any art form, but music is just, for most people, the most accessible way to get there, I think. Like, sound is so rooted in so many of us, and songs have the echoes of things we heard in childhood and past lives.
And so I love that idea of also just being in a place that has kind of been destroyed or that has been transformed. That’s a big area of interest for me as well. I’ve always been really drawn to ruins or interested in just… When we’re talking about ecology, people talk about the pristine a lot. And I think one of the big problems in environmentalism has been an emphasis on, like, we have to get back to this perfect, untouched wilderness. But the reality of the world is, it’s been disrupted by humans, and we need to work with that as well, I think, when we do this kind of ecological work, and work with the grief, and work with the whole spectrum. That’s our relationship to the world. So I love that you brought that process as well, and created open space for that kind of communication there.
JA: Thanks. Yeah, nice to hear about your process with singing too. Yeah. But yeah, there’s something about what happens with the sound waves. It feels like a powerful way to translate our languaging of words into a language that meets everything differently, perhaps with sound waves, with the voice.
IR: And I love that you said it sort of took you 20 years to get back to that forest as well. I think I’ve had a moment in a redwood forest in California that was maybe similar, and maybe there were some psychedelics involved that helped to open me up to some of the messages there. I could see myself going back in a while. I don’t know exactly what I’m waiting for, but I think that does happen a lot, where we get a call, and then we kind of go on this journey and come back to it.
JA: Yeah, absolutely.
I guess when I got the message the first time, I saw strong images and felt a very powerful pull, but I didn't have the tools yet. And maybe that's the journey, then. The 20 years afterward was like, oh, actually, I know exactly how to do this. And that finally came through.
I'd been making instruments with hollow trees. And there was a beautiful moment when, yeah, the first instrument I made—it was a really big hollow ash tree—was a collaboration with people with deafblindness. So that's how I came into working with tactile sound, to feel the sound.
On the opening performance—we made a performance, and everybody could play and lay inside and lean on this tree, and you could feel the sound vibrations all through your body. And there was a guy giving the tree a big hug and just soaking in all the vibrations with his chest. And he said, "I never thought I'd be a tree hugger."
And that moment ignited something in me that understood, oh, these tree instruments, that's what they can do. They can invite a kind of contact with trees that people maybe otherwise don't have or hadn't had previously, which can really help them feel the tree as another vibrant body, as they feel the strong vibration moving through them from the tree.
I see these tactile sound tree instruments a little bit like a gateway drug for sitting with living trees and feeling the subtle resonance. A gateway drug that can be very powerful. But perhaps at first, it could be experienced as something very subtle—a frequency one is not used to listening to.
IR: Yeah, that's so beautiful. I love that image of a tree instrument as a way of feeling. You can feel nature, but play it as an instrument, and that’s the bridge. I can totally see how that would bridge gaps. And yeah, it just reminds me of listening to conch shells, like water and crystals even. We're all called to listen to the earth. We just kind of don't realize what we're actually doing, I think, absolutely.
JA: So that tree instrument led to us making one in the logging coop from a massive Eucalyptus regnans. They're the tallest flowering trees on earth. So we all lay on this tree, on this big, big body-forest.
And, yeah, it was very clear that even though the forest had been cut, there was still a really powerful resonance there. It was clear that you can destroy a forest, but you don't necessarily destroy the soul of a place. Of course, it will take far more than our lifetimes to grow back. But the seed is in the ground.
IR: Beautiful. And that gets sort of into the realm of, like, spirits or memory—memory of places lasting longer than the actual place. Like, I'm in New York City right now. But it's built on the bones of forests, and it's built on a lot of other, you know, bloody histories too. And I think those things are present in ways. I think they're present, you know, not in this time but in the larger timescales. I think these things do affect us more than we know.
JA: Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, especially working in this way and anywhere in Australia, it's very present. Both the violence of colonization, and the power of country and strength of connection of Aboriginal people.
And now, right now, there's a really powerful movement going on in this forest of Aboriginal elders blockading the logging. So it feels like something's coming to a head, and hopefully, hopefully, the destruction is going to stop soon.
IR: Yeah, I really hope so. I think it's easy to feel like we're kind of stuck in this trajectory. And I know hope can be a complicated thing. There's also the need to embrace what is and not avoid it. But I do think—I just always go back to, like, we don't know. And there could be a mass movement and a huge change.
A lot of people are very frustrated with the way life is going now anyway. And we know that things need to change. And that need gets distorted in different ways by politicians or whoever. But that need feels very shared. So we'll see what happens. But I do think we need work. We definitely need work like yours to plant those seeds and give voice to people's inner knowing and all of that.
JA: So, thank you.
IR: Well, I'm sure I could talk to you forever about this and I’d love to hear more about any of the projects you worked on or the natural places you've worked with. But I also want to just open up to you if there's anything you want to talk a little bit more about before we end.
JA: Yeah, I don't know. We really went down the track of lament and forest. I could mention that there's a local forest here in Sweden that I'm working with now. Since this project has been ongoing for many years in Lutruwita, Tasmania, I had the feeling, oh, I'd really like to do something like this in Sweden. And then I got a call from a—you could say a forest guardian.
So now we've had a kind of art event in the forest. The aim is to really bring people to this forest, to make friends with this forest. The forest has been bought by a concrete company, and they have been filing applications to log, and that's been temporarily halted.
Right now I really feel that the most important thing I could do with my art and organizing skills is to help bring people to the forest. Because you kind of need to have a connection with the forest, or with whatever particular place it is, to love it deeply and to be prepared to protect it.
A our laws are being eroded here in Sweden on environmental protections, as they are in many, many places, I think strengthening this connection is really, really important— strengthening our connection with each other and with these places. And also, it’s important that the places themselves know that they're loved and not forgotten.
So, yeah, that's one of the things I'm preparing for now—to have an event there in the spring. And continuing to develop work with ecological grief and finding ways to open that for others.
So, together with my colleague Marianne Feal, we're going to London in March to present our performance Ecogrief Clinic, where we'll invite individual audience participants to have an experience with us. And that's part of the Conjuring Creativity Conference that's taking place in mid-March. So there are a couple of things going on right now.
IR: So beautiful. I will say, yeah, I would love to do, and have kind of have dreamed of doing the kind of work that you're doing. I don't know how to make it happen in my life. I've considered becoming a therapist. I've just wondered a lot about it. But I don't think it's something that's gonna appear in a linear fashion all at once. The work's not linear. But anyway, I'm very inspired by the work you've been sharing.
And if you have any wisdom for just kind of how to stay with the path, which can feel so nebulous—mostly though I just wanted to say I’m very, very inspired to see what you're crafting and weaving. And I hope to visit. I would love to visit your center someday.
JA: That would be wonderful. But I mean, I see that you are really on your path. You mentioned the redwoods as well. Maybe they call you back. You know nothing about that. I think all we can do is follow our curiosity and whatever the burning rage or urge is in us. I guess that's what propels me towards working with the forest.
I'm so furious about the destruction. I have to do something with my artwork too. So I think it's just taking one step at a time. And yeah, you are doing that. You're on your way.
IR: Just following those threads. Like, this podcast has been in my head for years, and it kept kind of being like, "Hey, hey." Then I just decided to go for it. And yeah, I think there’s been a lot of sadness in my life, too, and I think following that thread really led me to an ecological understanding that some of it might be coming from the earth. And that was a transformative experience because it felt like I couldn't quite trace it to my own life.
So I think following the emotions, even the shadowier ones too—it's easier said than done, but very powerful wisdom. And yeah, I've loved reading your reflections on that subject as well.
JA: Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I guess the thing is we use the tools we have at hand and find ways that lead to other things and other ways. It's a curious and kind of mystical process, what comes. But I really wish you the best with this and yeah, send you all my love and encouragement. I think you're doing great.
IR: Yeah, I mean, I can't wait to see how the space evolves and the landscape evolves and what is created in the cauldron that you're crafting there. So, yeah, thank you so much. And I really appreciate you chatting and am super excited to share this and put it out there, and grateful to have gotten to listen to it today myself.
JA: Lovely talking with you. Really.
IR: I love that you've had this flickering light on your face too. It's really very evocative. I can see you're in the flow of your path and sharing such wisdom with the world. So thank you.
JA: Thank you.
IR: Blue says thank you too.
JA: Hi, sweetie. Oh, such a lovely dog.
IR: She's not mine, but she's mine for the month, so we're hanging. Well, have a great one, and I'll let you know—it's coming out probably in a couple of weeks. So yeah, thank you.
JA: My pleasure. Take care.
