My immersive installation “Black Eden” is open in the pop-up annex of M. Museum, in Almere. Black Eden which alternatively could be called “Carbon Garden”, is about cognitive dissonance in a scorched paradise. It’s a comment on human self image and ecology.
Museum M. is making its mark by orienting itself towards immersive and landscape installations (Land art). To this end they’ve built a pavilion at the world horiticultural expo Floriade, and are starting to assert their presence in the city center. Five artists were invited to create five walk through —that is immersive— art installations in a former commericial space in the city center. The themes of the Floriade —the future and nature— carried through into the themes of the installations, inasmuch that “immersive art” can be narrative. My installation is also about the past, and the damage we’ve done, which makes the future so daunting.
Black Eden is an immersion in human vanity and folie, namely ecological depredation as seen through the lens of humanity’s self-mythologizing and its aesthetics. Humans see themselves as the centerpiece of paradise, but nature itself, long suffering, is indifferent. Black Eden touches on the Rococo, forest fires, iconoclast fury, Enlightenment vainglory, and more.
The silhouetted forest of rococo forms, related to my work with paper cuts, is made of cut wooden panels, scorched into coal. It smells of a recently burnt forest. The backdrop, an assemblage of 18th century iconographic prints, is defaced with charcoal in a bit of anti-aesthetic violence.
Until October at Citadel 22, Almere
