For over 15 years, an important part of my artistic practice arises in the digital realm: in the infinite void right behind the glass of my computer screen, where I'm navigating between the virtual x, y, and z axes of 3D software.
In this immaterial environment, I imagined Distant Pasts and Far Futures in which my concern for the ecological state of this planet lingered. I would describe escapism as my core business.
In my urban studio, my view on the city's rooftops would be replaced with wide landscapes, simulated nature inhabited by artificial trees. The densely populated area outside, with its impossibly complicated social relations, is exchanged for uninhabited worlds. Humanity would be reduced to remnants.
Between 2019 and 2023 I'm working on a doctoral artistic research project, The Appeal of the Unreal, that started out as an investigation of simulated nature through screen culture and habitat dioramas. But already within months of the start of this route, something happened that awoke a sense of urgency, pulling the project out of the comfort of the virtual axes and dropping it in Real Life coordinates.
In my artistic output, non-linearity is an unlikely constant. Actions can take place simultaneously, in another sphere, or in random order. There's something of a timeline included when it comes to the geological and sociological records of The Plot.
Here, at the start, you need to know the following: in the early 1960s, my grandfather bought a small forest near the village where he was born. Being from a Catholic farmer's family in the South of The Netherlands, my grandparents produced an impressive number of family members, all of which have a relation to het bosje (the little forest), as we would call it. As a child, we would have pic nics, and later on, we would regularly visit it to see how it was evolving. After my grandparents died, my mother inherited it. She's the current owner, and my partner in crime.
In September 2019, the little forest had to be cleared, and transformed into The Plot. The Plot has become an arena for artistic research, functions as a lens to investigate greater ecological issues, and is now the embodiment of ecological grief.
In 2020, the global upheaval of a virus added multiple dimensions to The Plot. We have to find ways to deal with issues that are beyond a human scale, and that resonate beyond our lifetime.
At the moment, The Plot is slowly being prepared for regeneration. There are many questions as to where to begin, what to set as targets, how to proceed. A special role lies in building a mythology around The Plot. This proves to come easy: despite its relatively poor geological composition, The Plot is quite fertile for the imagination.
Some of the works you're presented with in this article have multiple goals, but they arise from a desperate need to somehow help fix things. In that process, mistakes are made. I consider these to be of artistic value. In some cases, I'm even deliberately involved in scientific quackery, which I find an equally artistic medium.
This presentation shows part of the results of the first year of my phd trajectory.
"We come back from our field seasons increasingly broken. You can either think: I can’t do this, I’m going to have to change the science I do; or you might try to internalise all of that pain that you feel. Lots of scientists do the latter – they feel we should be objective and robust, not at the mercy of our emotions.
Increasingly, we’re realising that we can use that emotional response to form new questions. Working on the bleached and dying coral reefs is enormously important to understanding how those environments are changing. There is a real urge to want to do something about it, rather than just chart the demise. And that’s where our research is heading now. We’re trying to restore some coral reef communities, or a fishery, or replant a mangrove forest. We’re just trying to find ways of protecting pockets of really diverse, vibrant life, which might reseed much larger areas when we tackle the big issues."
Originally, the term 'contagion' was reserved for the spreadability of diseases. In Spillover. Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012) author David Quammen explains abundantly the close relation between rising numbers of emerging viruses and progressing ecological disturbances by human interventions.
This exposition is centered on a parallel kind of contagion: an infestation of spruce bark beetles, amplified by changing climatological circumstances.
Similar to a virus, a beetle plague is only really noticable after the result inflates to our visibility scale. In the case of this exposition, branches started to break off, some trees fell down during storms, needles turned brown and were shed, and eventually a small forest died.
This former forest is now The Plot.
How scientists are coping with ‘ecological grief’, Gaia Vince, The Observer/The Guardian, 12 January 2020.
In the Summer of 2020 Anno covidii I took a short holiday to escape the stone and asphalt of my usual urban environment. It was decided to drive to the German Schwarzald and the French Vosges in order to get reacquainted with long stretches of forest.
But here too, I was haunted by the traces of the spruce bark beetle outbreak.
From the Industrial Revolution on, the demand for coal skyrocketed, leading to the construction of coal mines in the South of the Netherlands from about 1900. To support the mine systems, much wood was needed: preferably spruce. As part of an employment scheme, the government had workers prepare ‘woeste gronden’ for the logging industry.
In the case of The Plot, development started only after 1950. When my grandfather acquired the little forest, it was covered in young Norway spruces. A pensioned farmer nearby remembers that as a child, he helped my grandfather selling some of these as Christmas trees.
An excerpt from 971220-980320, my graduation paper from the academy of art, Den Bosch (NL), illustrates some form of ecological grief already present in 1998.
"1997 was the hottest year since records began in 1782. In December, my mother’s chickens had chicks. One had eleven. Two were eaten by the cat. The other one had eight.
Early January trees started budding. A few days, temperatures reached 13, 14 degrees Celsius.
“Hooray! Spring is coming!”, people would say, “It’s so nice out.”
"Yeah, right," I thought, "Can't you see something is going horribly wrong?"
Summer 2020. A dying Norway spruce in the German Schwartzwald.
Picea abies
The natural distribution of Norway spruces (Picea abies) is confined to the alpine and nordic climates of Scandinavia, the Baltics, Western Russia, the Alps, Southern Poland, and higher areas of the Balkan. It’s being cultivated for economic reasons in large parts of Western and Central Europe, including the UK and Ireland, and used for paper production and timber. The shoot tips can be used to make syrups, tea, and even spruce beer.
The plague in the news outlets of Reuters and the Flemish public new channel VRT. Click on the images to view the articles.
I grew up in the countryside of a region that barely has any countryside left: The Netherlands and Flanders are densely populated, highly urbanized areas. 'Nature' has been confined to pockets of natural parks. A perpetual longing for wilderness gnaws at my heart. One could describe it as a feeling of homesickness while at home.
Solastalgia describes a form of emotional or existential distress caused by environmental change. Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who coined the term in 2005, describes it as “the homesickness you have when you are still at home”. In many cases this is in reference to global climate change, but more localized events such as volcanic eruptions, drought or destructive mining techniques can cause solastalgia as well.