Curator’s Note
The LAND consortium has asked me to design and curate a website about our place as makers and festivals within the landscape. Our place in this time, where the landscape is rapidly changing under the strain of human-caused climate change. What you should know about LAND makers is this: we work outdoors, creating and producing performances and installations that engage with the site we’re on, installations where the audience can sit in or climb and feel the wind and rain on their skin. So the question is to put something together about this, but digitally in 2D, a collection place that you can visit from your sofa at home with the heating on. Right.
You know what, I’m up for that. As a graphic designer I’m used to working with material that is given to me, sort it, fold it, create new insights and as a philosopher I’m trained to look beyond contradictions. So: laptop on my lap, InDesign and Google Scholar open. I’ll start here, on the first floor of an old worker’s house in Arnhem, the Netherlands. Coordinates: 51.98678, 5.91899. I can see quite far— The Netherlands are flat — and I see the horizon just past the Rhine. And I think: I could walk toward the horizon and never stop. I will never touch that line in the landscape. (Something like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.) Climate psychologists teach us that our brains struggle with two things when it comes to the climate crisis: addressing problems over long periods of time and over great distances. We are backyard and today-oriented, even though supposedly no one can live in the “now.” We use one of our most important landscape lines — the horizon — as a fence to throw our mess over. The other side always safely at a distance. I get it, my brain works this way too, but I’m tired of it. I want to relearn perspective drawing.
Line in the Landscape
I have few good memories of the perspective drawing lessons at school. It was the first time I truly became aware of the horizon (yes, I had definitely stood on a magnificent viewpoint before, but as a teenager, you care less about that). We had to draw a road, very traditionally. Totally unfamiliar. The landscape – I had known until then considered to be very organic – turned out to consist of rigid lines. Drawing true to nature (‘natuurgetrouw’, in Dutch), as the teacher called it. As if my previous drawings, squiggly and winding, had betrayed nature. When you draw in perspective, you place a dot on a horizontal line and then draw all the objects and lines towards that point. The starting point: the beginning of your landscape on paper. Or perhaps your destination, over there in the distance.
When we zoom out far from our paper, we do not see just one horizontal line across the earth, but many drawn meridians and parallels that form our network of latitudes and longitudes. In the past, we followed these lines on maps to find our way. Nowadays, our location is determined with a single click on our navigation system. In contrast to the point on an always-shifting horizon, there is indeed a starting point in this web of lines. The origin, as it is called in a graph, where the x and y axes meet. When we navigate to that point — coordinate 0,0 — we end up in an unexpected place: right in the Gulf of Guinea, about 600 km south of Accra — the capital of Ghana — and over 1000 km west of Kobékobe, a small coastal town in Gabon. This is where it all starts, every journey we make that is not by chance but mapped out in advance. Everyone with a laptop or smartphone is in contact with this place every day: when you visit a coffee shop, avoid a traffic jam, or grant an app permission to use your location, you are in contact with point 0,0. In milliseconds, our position on Earth — “you are here” — is calculated from this location, as well as our destination.
The departure point of our landscape has been given the nickname ‘Null Island’ by cartographers. It is an ‘island’, no more than a weather buoy, bobbing on the whims of the Atlantic Ocean. An area where many hurricanes originate in late summer. Apparently, they too are aware of the ‘originality’ of this location.
So, the center of our constructed world is not Amsterdam, New York, or Singapore, but a data-buoy-turned-island. It is a center that swings, bangs, and thunders. Perhaps the most dynamic place on Earth. And not just because of the hurricanes and billions of internet waves it processes daily. It is also our buzzing center of climate catastrophe. If you sail from this point, you’ll encounter coastlines in every direction where the landscape is changing rapidly. To the north and east, the rainforests and wetlands of West Africa; to the west, the rainforests of Brazil; and to the south, the coastline of Antarctica. Deforestation, drought, extreme rainfall, erosion, declining biodiversity, melting ice… not to mention the state of the ocean itself. The center of the world offers a panoramic view of the retreat of the most beautiful places on Earth. A sea buoy full of data and stories we prefer to stash away in our pocket once we’ve reached our destination.
Do you feel that climate catastrophe burning in your pocket now? Probably not, huh? The urgency disappeared when you saw that meme of a cute cat pop up on your home screen. Ostrich behavior. Nothing is more human. As a cat lover, I won’t blame you for it. It takes a lot of courage to stand on Null Island.
Line in Time
Embracing capriciousness can, fortunately, also be done with solid ground beneath your feet. In the spring of 2023, I’m walking with land steward Rob on the grounds of a former farm in the Dorset district, in the south of England. Fields full of thistles and grasses. The famous pioneers. “A mess,” some of the neighbors say, but Rob sees the first traces of a diverse future. This area is being rewilded: nature is being given space to restore natural processes. It’s particularly interesting, Rob says, because this is a patchwork of soil types. Does flora and fauna respond differently to clay than to sand or peat? To map this, they’ve collected soil samples from every plot of land so that the current state can be compared with the state in a few years, and the map of rewilding can be redrawn.
An ecological baseline of the landscape. These are objective measurements: counts of species and percentages indicating proportions. As a scientist, you can have an objective, or as objective as possible, relationship with the landscape, but as a human being, you cannot. We have a relationship with that one tree where we used to build huts. In our minds, we constantly make baseline measurements of the landscape — memories — and things were better back then. More forested, wilder, cleaner. The danger of these mental baselines, Rob says, is that when we talk about ecological restoration, we are not ambitious enough. We think of nature restoration as a landscape from a point back in time, from our youth. This applies to every generation. The idea of what the landscape was supposed to look like changes with each generation, which means our ideal becomes impoverished. A shift in the baseline, he calls it beautifully. My childhood landscape is less rich than that of my parents, but even three generations ago, that landscape was no longer so beautiful: fertilized, raked, polluted, deforested, and overburdened. What he is saying – indirectly – is, I believe, this: we need to dream bigger if we are to give nature space. The horizon of our childhood memories is as fictitious as the line I see at the end of these fields. What do we dream of then? A landscape from before the industrial revolution? From before the Middle Ages? A time of ancient trees? Dinosaurs?
Just like that point on the horizon where everything seems to run towards and disappears into nothing, that point back in time doesn’t exist. You can walk all you want, but you only go forward. The landscape of the past will never exist again, even if we recreate it realistically. Someone who understood this a long time ago is landscape artist Robert Smithson. In the 1970s, he made large-scale landscape interventions, mostly in the United States (and one work in Europe, Broken Circle Spiral Hill in Drenthe, Netherlands). A pioneer for art outside the white walls with an eye for ecology. In the book Robert Smithson: Art in Continual Movement, art historian Anja Novak makes an interesting observation based on Smithson’s famous thought experiment with the sandbox. It’s a simple way to explain the physical process of ‘entropy’: the idea that you can’t retrace lines in time, but that everything always moves forward and becomes more chaotic. It sounds scarier than it is. Smithson imagines a sandbox, one half filled with black sand and the other with white sand. Now, let a child run in circles clockwise and the black and white sands mix into a gray mush. If that child now runs in counterclockwise circles—‘back in time’—the white and black sand does not restore itself, no, the sandbox just becomes messier. This is how ecological restoration works: you can’t travel back in time to a state of being like it was before. We can only go forward, and that is always a different landscape than before. The landscape that was will never exist again. We can’t preserve the land, but we can return it and trust in the mess and chaos that will emerge.
Shifting Baselines
The reason that drawing assignment felt oppressive back then lies in the core of the word itself: horizein, ancient Greek for ‘to limit’ or ‘to separate’. Separating land from air or water from air. And separating here from there. It’s a Eurocentric approach to the landscape. Categorizing and distinguishing things in relation to each other and to ourselves, rather than seeing the lines as part of a whole, a picture much larger than ourselves. It is this attitude, among other things, that plays a role in the climate crisis: with the horizon as a beacon, we create the suggestion that our landscape has a boundary, and that we can keep what happens beyond that so-called horizon at a distance. A safety line. We separate there from here, draw lines around a problem, and label it a ‘solution’ far away. And we ‘solve problems’ within our own lines without looking at the consequences beyond the horizon: in the Global South, the atmosphere, or even in space. We draw such a fictitious line in time as well, not to keep it at a distance, but to clamp onto it. So that we can still go back. While we only have air in our hands.
This online exhibition has been curated in an attempt to heal our relationship with time and space. This platform is our ‘Null Island’; an aesthetic overview of landscapes in intense motion. But unlike the weather buoy, this overview is not silent: the eight makers and thinkers on this platform break the horizon in half and replace the space that emerges with new, colorful lines. Diagonal, interrupted, 360 degrees around, or radically cutting through the planet. We zoom out to get closer and question the current system of maps, landscape management, and the image of a fair green future. This is what we can do as artists right now; when politics stalls and science is not heard, when the old maps no longer suffice, and familiar paths wear thin, we stretch the rules of perspective drawing with collages, photography, essays, and poetry, offering alternative worldviews.