Woodford Bamboo Forest and Treatment Center

with Environmental Bamboo Foundation

The Woodford Folk Festival provides an opportunity for research and experimentation that is globally unique. The strong support of festival leadership has created a platform for collaboration with various international experts and a space for direct dissemination to the Australian public through large scale installations, workshops and talks.

The collaboration between Taiwanese artist Wang Wen Chih and Cave Urban in 2013 proved to be a catalyst for encouraging Woodford’s engagement with fostering a culture of bamboo cultivation and design. Partnering with the Woodford Folk Festival and Cave Urban, Arief Rabik has been working to help grow the bamboo community in Australia. Utilising the Woodford site as a testing ground for further research that can directly translate back to Indonesia, Arief has been prototyping a new treatment for bamboo.

The focus of this project is to create a closed loop system for growing, treating and constructing with bamboo. The project begun with the propagation of a two-hectare bamboo forest, which is watered from the disinfected waste water of the entire site. Situated on a hillside, the project will study the change in soil conditions and the effect if utilising nutrient rich black water on the bamboo.

Planting began in 2015 and was finished in 2017. Over the next five years the forest will establish itself and provide a sustainable annual yield of bamboo to be utilised across the Woodfordia site. To ensure the longevity of the bamboo that is harvested it will in turn have to be treated.