WORK IN PROGRESS

 

 

 

 

The lonely tree & the burden of things

Sculpture/video installation

 

In the last decade, politicians and environmentalist have started to pay increasing attention to the ecological crisis. Today, we are well aware that we live on an endangered planet and, some say, in a completely new geological epoch – the anthropocene. In order to handle the ecological crisis, collective responsibility is required. But the ecological crisis also affects us on an individual level and requires something from us as individuals. We need to rethink how we choose to live our daily life, but we also need to rethink the distinctions we have made between man and nature.

 

For a long time, nature was regarded as a thing to be conquered by humankind. Today, the boundaries between man and nature are being questioned, not the least by scientists working with for example plant intelligence (the idea that plants, usually considered passive organisms, have an ability to communicate and make decisions) and planetoids (robots that mimics how plants function and adapts to the environment like a natural system).

 

In the project The lonely tree & the burden of things, I experiment with ways of communicating that challenge the borders between man and nature. I am doing this in several different ways: By adapting human movement to the slow-moving times of trees; by transforming the bric-à-brac of our time to soil; by trying to give something we consider deeply human back to “nature” (may it be love or fear; cocktail parties or bureaucracy). Whether this will work or not is not the point. My hope is to use art to enable us to further rethink the distinctions between man and nature.