The European spruce bark beetle is an inconspicuously looking little creature of about 5 millimeters long. In balanced circumstances, they’re the janitors of spruce forests, cleaning up dead wood, clearing sick trees, and maintaining numerous relationships to plants and animals. On the other hand, when numbers explode into an infestation, it develops itself into one of the main causes of natural disturbances of the woodlands. Due to its disproportionately large impact on ecosystems, it’s considered to be a keystone species, for better or for worse.1
A lot of tree species have their own designated bark beetle: it’s a family of 2000. Most bark beetles will only move to weak, dead, or dying trees, but some are quite agressive and capable of bringing down even healthy hosts if numbers have exploded. Thousands of beetles can inhabit one tree.
Bark beetles usually make the life of a tree difficult by digging tunnels between the tree bark and the wood, subsequently cutting off sap supply. Healthy trees can overcome an infestation by encapsulating the affected areas in resin, but weakened trees are doomed. An exception is the Elm bark beetle, which will infect trees by spreading a type of microfungi, causing the incurable Dutch elm disease.
There’s no remedy for a bark beetle outbreak, and an infestation is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to halt.
Climate change driven prolonged periods of drought, enhanced by increasingly hot summers are challenging the health and survival of Europe’s forests. Heat and drought stressed trees first discard their leaves, and later on even some of their branches, in order to direct as many resources as possible to the trunk, attempting to stay alive until better circumstances might arrive.
The ground water levels of the already relatively dry, sandy soils of The Plot have plummeted due to agricultural activities and the pumping of drinking water in the region. Hot, dry summers evaporate available water much quicker. Also, dehydrated, hardened soil doesn’t soak up rain from occasional heavy showers that well. The installation of some measures to divert water back to the surrounding heath lands in the last decade hasn’t had a decisive effect yet.
III. Mourning/Mistakes.
The beetle’s main tree of choice is the Norway spruce, which is widely planted throughout Europe outside of its native range for economic reasons. Other trees that are prone to the beetle’s visits include local fir, pine and larix varieties, although they function more or less as backups, after Norway spruces become unavailable.
The beetle lays its eggs twice, or if conditions are favourable even three times a year. It digs its way to the inner tree bark, and while moving forward through the wood, strings its eggs in, one after another. Once the larvae hatch, they eat themselves a way outwards, leaving tunnels that grow wider as the well-fed larvae approach the great outdoors.
These tunnel patterns have a remarkable hieroglyphic quality, hence the Latin name: Ips typographus.
In Dutch, the beetle is known as ‘letterzetter’, which means ‘compositor’. Ips leaves an abundance of evidence, after it has settled in trees: its patterns can be found on the insides of pieces of bark, but also on the trunks themselves. There’s an enormous variety in shapes, sizes, and complexity but all have a main tunnel - the ‘mother’ tunnel - from which the other tunnels branch out.
A piece of Evidence from the plot was photographed and printed, then traced into a drawing. With software - Photosounder - the drawing was then turned into audio, a process called sonification.
First attempts used the stylized drawings from my notebook. The result was not satisfactory: it was rather bland and uninteresting. Only after I used the traced pattern, the audio became a lament, a composition.
This is The Compositor Composing.
The forester who cleared the plot left three tree stumps for birds of prey to sit on. These resemble a monument, and are treated as such.
The stumps were made into a photogrammetric model. The trunks will rot over time, but I'm looking into ways to prevent them from disappearing completely. They could be injected with a resin, for instance.
To 'charge' the three tree trunks so they transform into totems, I'm regularly adding plaquettes and other small adjustments related to my research.
The top of one of the Three Trees makes a face, a sad face, filled with horror.
It was made into a detailed photogrammetric model, which is turned into a 3D printed life sized mask, which can be used in future rituals or performative actions, or simply serve as a permanent record of the rotting tree top.
I started by using drawings of Ips typographus patterns to design a wallpaper. This wallpaper can be used as a background for an installation, for instance.
The background of this webpage is the same pattern.
Far left image: view of the wallpaper mounted on my studio wall.
But what is Ips typographus trying to tell us? In an attempt to make The Compositor's tunnels more ledgible, they were transformed into a usable typeface.
Designer Jeroen 'Joebob' Van der Ham is specialized in designing fonts based on his own handwriting, including all clumsy mistakes. The glyphs are based on some of my drawings, and, as per my instruction, the font is 26% readable.
My trip to The Plot crosses the Belgian-Dutch border. Due to Covid related travel restrictions, I'm not at The Plot as much as I would like, but every time I am there, an interesting conversation takes place. The Three Trees will also function as a meeting ground, a place to reflect on the reality of the ecological issues at hand, and an arena for performative research.
I've made a photogrammetric model of the Three Trees, which comes in handy when travelling to The Plot is difficult. At the same time, the model functions as a simulation for possible modifications and additions.
A piece of bark, taken from The Plot in February 2020, picture here life sized. The tunnels were first cleaned from sand and sawdust in order to achieve a better contrast. Then it was photographed. The photo was printed and used to trace a section of the tunnels, resulting in a black and white drawing reflecting the actual pattern, as opposed to the stylized notebook drawings.
