DG - HOLZWEGE - Where the Paths Disappear

Holzwege is a poetic film essay developed during an artist residency at Brunsberg Konsthall in Värmland, Sweden. Through a slow cinematic drift in forested landscapes and abandoned structures, the film reflects on creativity as a process shaped by interruption, uncertainty, and pause. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s notion of Holzwege, the work frames dead ends not as failure, but as generative thresholds of transformation.

Watch online: BRUNSBERG - HOLZWEGE

HOLZWEGE — Where the Paths Disappear

A Filmic Essay

There are places that do not offer answers, only pauses.
Brunsberg is one of them.

HOLZWEGE — Where the Paths Disappear emerged during a retreat at Brunsberg Konsthall in Värmland, Sweden — a former forest research station turned into a space for artistic listening. What began as a simple walk through the surrounding forest slowly unfolded into a meditation on creativity, doubt, and transformation.

The film follows no clear route. Like the woodland paths themselves, it drifts, stops, doubles back, and dissolves. Overgrown trails, clearings, and decaying structures become metaphors for the creative process: nonlinear, fragmentary, shaped by interruptions rather than progress. Here, Martin Heidegger’s notion of Holzwege—paths that lead nowhere—serves not as theory, but as lived experience.

Shot with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 4K and vintage Zeiss/Hasselblad lenses, the visual language privileges texture, duration, and silence. Moss-covered wood, filtered light, and slow movement resist narrative efficiency. Time stretches. Meaning gathers gradually, almost accidentally.

The forest does not instruct; it reflects. As the outer paths vanish, an inner cartography begins to form. Creativity reveals itself not as output or achievement, but as a practice of attention — of staying with uncertainty long enough for something else to appear.

HOLZWEGE does not document a destination. It marks a threshold.
A moment where movement pauses, orientation falters, and becoming quietly continues.

This film is part of the ongoing series SONGLINES OF BECOMING, a long-term exploration of creative life as a lived, embodied journey — traced through landscapes, memory, and wandering thought.

Dead Ends as Turning Points

The creative process revealed in HOLZWEGE is not driven by momentum, but by interruption. Progress emerges precisely where movement stalls—at moments of hesitation, disorientation, and silence. The film suggests that transformation does not occur through force or clarity, but through sustained attention to uncertainty. By lingering at dead ends rather than overcoming them, creativity shifts from production to perception. What changes is not the path itself, but the one who walks it: a gradual recalibration of seeing, listening, and trusting the slow, often invisible work of becoming.

An Invitation to Wander Together

This film is not meant to be concluded, but continued.
If HOLZWEGE resonates with you, I invite you to pause and reflect: Where have you recently encountered a dead end—creatively, personally, or in your thinking? Did it signal an ending, or did it quietly ask for a different kind of attention?

Feel free to share your thoughts, questions, or fragments of experience—here, in the comments, or elsewhere along your own path. Dialogue, like creativity, begins when we allow ourselves to linger, listen, and get a little lost together.