This slide show tells the story of an activist who escapes an urban environment for an autonomous life in nature. His new environment is not an untouched paradise, but the peripheral areas of European urban centers. Trying to establish a new relationship with nature, the activist creates a kind of folk wisdom that is rooted in a dialogue with plants and animals. This newly created folk wisdom is what the Escapist Story (Forest School) teaches.

The work plays with the romantic aspects of the situation it explores and is inspired by American writer Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854). Though immersed in fiction, Escapist Story (Forest School) is a project, which could constitute a collection of practical and metaphysical guidelines for people who decide to escape civilization and live in the forest. As Thoreau wrote, “it is not enough to know the tricks of the hunters, you must also study the poetry of the forest.”