The current social engagement with environmental issues has developed into a debate of mythical proportions: the struggle seems to be between good and evil, between fact and fiction, and between fear and hope. But can the dividing line between environmentally friendly and environmentally polluting be drawn so accurately? The works in the exhibition gave a view of a confusing world, in which the polluted landscape appears paradisiacal, a global issue becomes personal, and beauty also has a gruesome aspect.
In the computer animation Evolizer (2007), filmmaker Jan van Nuenen sketches an image of evolution that has got out of hand. Robot-like figures move through a futuristic, colourless cityscape. When one of them opens a box, spontaneous modulations create ever-larger numbers of organic forms and it develops into a battle for survival. Jan van Nuenen builds his computer animations from fragments of visual material found on the Internet. He processes the material into experimental films in which landscapes, people and machines proliferate, transform and mutate at a rapid rate.
For the installation Psilotum Nudum, Arjen van Krieken used discarded materials, the material consequences of our current consumer society. Van Krieken constructs his monumental sculptures out of scrap. He combines car parts, moped frames and discarded household materials in an associative way to make sculptures that appear to take on a life of their own. In his organic installations, industrialization becomes an autonomous process, over which it seems that mankind has long since ceased to have any control.
In her photo series Nature Illusions, Beatrice Jansen represents the desire to compensate for the disappearing nature. Real nature is increasingly being replaced by the artificial: a radio mast that has the appearance of a tree and a painted desert landscape intended to brighten up an inner courtyard. The experience of nature becomes a consumable, which has nothing to do with the original nature.
Frank Bruggeman is fascinated by nature and, in fact, even more so by the way in which people relate to it. He analyses living environments and presents his findings in an entirely personal system of classification. In his installation Natureobject #1 he combines bright blue gardening equipment with dried and living plants. At first sight the piece looks like a traditional flower arrangement, but it deviates through the use of materials.
Inspired by a poem written by the Russian poet Fyodor Tiutchev, Ine Lamers captured the natural surroundings and edges of towns near the Ural Mountains in a series of evocative photos. This area is known for the sweeping industrialization that occurred during communism and the large-scale state interventions to economize the countryside. The way in which the population mystifies, cherishes or even adores the Russian ‘mother earth’ stands in sharp contrast to this. The large-format photographic pieces subtly implicate us in an uncertain reality in which the industrial and the natural appear to merge into one another and the decline of nature also contains beauty.
Tom Mosman and Margriet Essink have been working together under the name Duotuin since 1990. Both are visual artists and horticulturists. They argue that every garden design is in fact a reflection of a social topicality. Just as the garden designs in the Renaissance were geometrical in order to tame the dangerous and savage nature, so the Duotuin designs are now organic sanctuaries in a world where nature is under threat. The installation Rotterdam 2053 refers to the disastrous floods of 1953. The rising sea level and the increasing amount of river water may make habitation in the future only possible in some floating form.
The Multiscape sculptures of Pim Palsgraaf possess a sinister beauty. Foxes, deer and other stuffed animals bear an industrialized cityscape on their backs or clamber out of one. The soft fur and strong colours of the animals contrast with the greyness and rigid form of the urban structure. Urbanization is presented as morbid growth, as a tumour that sprouts from the animal and will eventually strike it down.
Erik Sep builds miniature cities, towers of Lego and iron, houses out of building debris and melted plastic into an organically growing city. Favelatower is a miniature slum dwelling for the twentyfirst century. Just as in the real ‘favelas’, the lack of space and technical constraints lead to ingenious solutions. In the fictitious world of Erik Sep there is no town and country planning; roads lead to unknown destinations, houses sprout from the roofs of other houses.
What kind of relationship do people have with their urban environment? Is there such a thing as individual space or is everything prescribed from above? Aletta de Jong tries to find an answer to these questions. Through her fascination for edible plants in the wild and in the city she wishes to inform city-dwellers that they could be self-sufficient in providing their own dietary needs. Thus she made an inventory of all the plants around the city hall in Rotterdam according to toxicity. In assignment for the Erasmus Medisch Centrum she examined the use of greenery to help promote the healing process. In the photo series Concrete Food, which she made in London, De Jong captured the way in which people appropriate greenery in their environment.