Hoe benader en benut je bescheiden landschappen? Methodes uit het artistieke onderzoeksproject Land-shapes, Sooth-scapes

Linde Ex

Over the past one-and-a-half years, I have been conducting comparative research on salt marsh landscapes in Scotland, England and the Netherlands within the exchange residency programme Deluge.¹ This programme was initiated by the organisation Art Walk Porty in Portobello, Edinburgh, for which founder Rosy Naylor invited two other organisations (ArtGene in Barrow-in-Furness and the University of Groningen) to team up. Each organisation is geographically close to and affiliated with local salt marshes, and presented an artist to research and artistically explore all three salt marshes in exhibitions, workshops and publications.

Salt marshes are tidal wetlands. The soil is usually composed of mud and peat. Because they flood twice a day with salt or brackish water, salt marshes are dense with low-growing, salt-tolerant vegetation. Salt marshes are important ecosystems that have been exploited heavily through human activities. Their importance for biodiversity, protecting coastlines, sequestering carbon, et cetera, is hard to do adequate justice to, when first encountering their underwhelming aesthetics. The salt marshes and tidal landscapes that I visited have little contrast and few objects standing out vertically in them. They share characteristics with other flatland landscapes such as moors, tundra’s, steppes, plains and some deserts.

Glancing from the outside

I started researching with a visual approach to the landscape, finding myself looking at the salt marshes from a bridge, a dike, a road, a train track. The landscape as a land that was shaped by human hands was the point of view – a “striated space”, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold calls it. “Striated space” is, he says, “homogeneous and volumetric: in it, diverse things are laid out, each in its assigned location. To look around in striated space is, as the original meaning of skopos implies, to shoot visual arrows at their targets”.²

When discussing salt marshes with different groups of people, the (in)ability to appreciate the marshes as “sublime” or “picturesque” was often discussed.³ The conclusion was repeatedly that the salt marsh lacked these qualities and was therefore considered not worth much attention. This perception can also be found in literature and recent studies on salt marshes or similar landscapes.⁴

Long, wide views of repetitive patches of land and water that dissolve into one another: air becomes silt, becomes water, becomes vegetation. You either appreciate the openness, constant wind and subtleness of these landscapes or you feel indifferent to or even bored by them: the landscape as “blandscape”.⁵ The writer Robert Macfarlane describes a similar landscape, the moor of Lewis, as “a nothing place, distinguished only by its self-similarity”.⁶ It is an attitude towards salt marshes and similar places as land that can be easily confiscated, an attitude that ignores subtle beauty and details finely engraved in the landscape. Land toned down by agriculture, industrialisation and population growth, land managed from a fear of being swallowed by the sea.

I felt a separation between myself and the land because I approached the salt marsh mainly as an image that was ‘out there’, yet there was a longing to experience the salt marsh from within and engage with it directly. Artist and writer Sarah Kanouse states in an article on artistic tours (artistic works in the form of a tour that asks participants to become tourists) that the “visual dimension of a site often conceals the ‘production of space’ by historical and contemporary economic, social, and ecological agents, and is often designed to do so”.⁷ Because the “production of space” holds the history and attitudes that led to the current climate and ecological challenges, it seems more and more important to face these histories and processes and to find new ways to approach them. Although I had a limited rational and theoretical understanding of how these landscapes were shaped by humans and nonhumans, by histories and processes, I lacked a felt, complex, responsive and sensitive appreciation and approach that could unveil aspects of this “production of space”.

The stories, modes of perception, processes, entanglements and networks that created the land, speak a language of land use. This language is engraved in the land: the patterns and the shapes reveal its origins. Not only on the surface of the land of “striated space” but also in the “movement and flux” of “smooth space”, to speak with Ingold.

Smooth space (…) has no layout. It presents, rather, a patchwork of continuous variation, extending without limit in all directions. It is an atmospheric space of movement and flux, stirred up by wind and weather, and suffused with light, sound and feeling.⁸

I saw myself confronted with the still-dominant visual paradigm of the landscape assessed by human criteria whilst knowing of and longing for approaches that could do justice to “smooth space” with all its multispecies entanglements and relations. Instead of depicting the visual surface, the scenery of a glorious watery landscape like Caspar David Friedrich in Das Große Gehege, I sought ways to engage with and experience the primordial soup that the salt marsh is referred to sometimes. This incentive raises the question of whether it is best to step away from the visual, from the distance that looking at scenery can create. In the introduction of the book Critical Landscapes: Art, Space Politics the editors refer to this dilemma as follows:

At play is an overall shift from representation toward presentation, or performance, one might say. Indeed, the question seems to hover in the background of whether or not painting and photography – as media that collapse the worldly into the static and the two-dimensional – are capable of relaying the frictions, layers, and inter-relations of landscape. Are there inherent limits to using media that, in essence, translate their subject into a scene?⁹

A reason to approach the marsh visually though is that salt marshes are vulnerable ecologies. The salt marshes in the Netherlands that I visited can only be entered outside the bird nesting season and with a guide. The salt marsh near Edinburgh cannot be walked on at all. There is a bridge over it, not only to prevent wet feet but primarily to protect the marsh. I was able to walk on the marshes around Barrow-in-Furness, but these too are part of protected nature reserves. Besides the restrictions on being physically in the salt marshes, people’s lives are also more and more urbanised. We live in places that are not in the immediate proximity of salt marshes. For many of us, the salt marsh is not, or is no longer, part of our habitat.

Wetlands are very important for biodiversity as a breeding room for the aquatic food web. They are also essential against climate change, they store more carbon per hectare than any other vegetation type. Furthermore, they protect coastlines, villages and cities against floods from the sea and inland flood water. Despite all this, they are in great danger of disappearance. The title of the exchange residency that I was invited to is not for nothing Deluge, the flood is coming. We need ways to experience the salt marsh, establish relationships with it, and overcome the nature/culture binary, becoming “Earthbound” as the philosopher Bruno Latour calls it.¹⁰ But this should not only be possible by jumping in the marsh. The works, methods and approaches developed in this project are translations. They speak “the language of the world, provided that we learn to translate ‘the animist, religious, or mathematical versions’ from one to another”.¹¹ The immersive experiences of my research in the saltmarsh are translated into other versions, that aim to evoke relations with ‘salt marshness’.

What I was aiming for in this project, was to make humble attempts to develop artistic methods or attitudes that could 1) overcome the still prevalent visual approach of landscape as scenery and the classification of salt marshes as underwhelming stemming from that perception; 2) create felt and imaginative relations with human and non-human salt marsh life and entities; 3) translate these relations and experiences in the marsh so that the salt marsh can be related and experienced with internally, when not being physically in the marsh; 4) unveil parts of complex traces of extraction and human design in the marsh; 5) start a process of care for the salt marsh.

All methods were repeated with groups during art walkshops. It was important to me to find out if the methods I used could be adopted by others and if it would be possible to engage people who experienced a similar separation from the salt marsh world, as I did in the beginning.

This article will discuss how I developed the concepts of “Land-shapes” and “Sooth-scapes” as ways to approach the salt marsh and how I worked with them in the art walkshops. I will retrace my artistic research process and discuss the methods I used and developed. Land-shapes starts from a visual approach to landscapes and proposes to approach the landscape not as scenery, but as a collection of shapes where life takes place in knots and entanglements. It is about the transition from looking at shapes to looking in shapes at the particularities, histories and actors that shaped the land. Sooth-scapes, as the word scapes indicates, continue with the shapes of the land and the language of land use, but now as a possibility for speculation and imagination.

Land-shapes

From my research journal:

The train follows the whimsical coastline of Morecambe Bay in the North of England. It is early in the evening; the sun is losing strength. I look over the bay, the glistening water surface hugged by the hills, and I see the patches, the raised peat vegetation islands shaped by the tides surrounded by tidal creeks. Their shapes are very clear: organic, rounded, streamlined shapes.¹²

A clue in me slowly became clearer. Through the shapes, I could see an entrance into the elusive aesthetics of the flatland.

Approaching the landscape through the lens of Land-shapes informed my artistic methods and the ways I explored the particularities, creators (authors, like flora, fauna, weather, geological processes, human activities etc.) and entanglements in the landscape. I tried to move beyond established categories like species or divisions such as natural/cultural. In a shape, a multitude of layers (materials, histories, stories …) come together branching out into other shapes.

The Land-shapes perspective started a process of visually determining and defining shapes in the landscape. This may sound simple but it meant that I had to attune to the landscape and decide for myself what is part of the shape and what is not. This suggests that one creates artificial boundaries between things that are naturally connected. But the interesting thing is that because of this process of lifting shapes out of the landscape, the connections became more and more felt and clear. Ingold states in his book The Life of Lines that life is made of lines, not built from blocks. I propose to look at the shapes in the land as such. Not blocks or cutouts that can be pasted together to form the landscape but knots of lifelines. Land-shapes may start with the visual determination of a shape (looking at the landscape), but then dives into the shape to experience the knot. The impossibility of separating shapes from their environment, whilst being able to determine a visual perception of that shape, meant that I could focus on the complexities within the shape whilst being aware of the diffuseness of the boundaries of the shape. By defining the shape, I focussed on the web of relations at the edges of the shape, where the lines went on and where my own lifeline came from and would go.

Land-shapes, for me, is not a static concept of only noticing shapes in landscapes. Engaging with landscapes through Land-shapes inspired action. Land-shapes informed three approaches: 1) I walked through the landscape, or better said, I walked with the landscape; 2) I observed and focussed on particularities of the place and made an archive of references to shapes; 3) I drew a collection of shapes.

Treading a flatland

In the Netherlands on the salt marsh near Pieterburen, art historian and curator Anna-Rosja Haveman and I organised the first art walkshops. We advertised the art walkshops in different places aiming to attract a diverse group of participants, from local residents to students. In the seal centre in Pieterburen participants got a quick introduction to the project and how the concept of Land-shapes can inform the way you observe and interact with the landscape. After that, participants walked for one-and-a-half hours over the marsh. The first part of the walk was accompanied by a guide from the nature and landscape foundation Het Groninger Landschap. The guide gave information about the historical, ecological and geological attributes of the landscape and the participants could ask questions. After half an hour of walking from the dike to the more water-exposed part of the marsh, the group was asked to walk for the rest of the time alone in silence observing shapes in the marsh and making snapshots. The instruction was to concentrate on shapes which are assembled of multiple things, objects and actors and not on single objects. For many participants, the first tendency is to focus on individual things, like a plant or a beautifully shaped stone. Others find it hard to discern a shape, a concentration of threads, in a landscape where everything seems to dissolve into each other. Apparently, a lot of us are trained to either see the object or the landscape and not the complexities of shapes and their details. This part of the art walkshop was to “roam” in “smooth space” a way of observing that considers textures, light and subtleties rather than identifiable objects and classifications.¹³

Roaming through walking

During my own walks, I was very aware of viewing the marsh as an outsider and making a movement into ‘salt marshness’. I had to go into the marsh to experience “smooth space” and the “production of space”.¹⁴ Here the visual approach changed, from scenery, a landscape, the way a Western landscape painter would see the salt marsh, to a drawing perception, or to speak with Ingold: “Whereas painting moves to completion, drawing carries on, manifesting in its lines a history of becoming rather than an image of being.”¹⁵

Through walking, I had an embodied experience of the shapes from different angles and distances. I engaged visually and through my other senses with landscapes of which, according to Kanouse, “most visual representations are maps, diagrams, and aerial imagery, rather than the view from the ground”.¹⁶ This tourist attitude and gaze is important to be aware of when studying a landscape that one doesn’t live in or is rooted in through deep, felt history or experiences. In the landscapes that I study, I am usually a temporary visitor, a by-passer, but through the process of moving into the marsh I tried to engage with “the site, in all its messy specificity, in relation to much larger ecological, infrastructural, and political systems as well as other places, times and forces”.¹⁷

By walking, I also transformed the landscape I traversed. Leaving footmarks that became small puddles, flatting grasses, my body creating subtle changes in the direction of the wind where I stood. The landscape is not something I researched as an objective outsider. I was part – if even momentarily – of its processes, contributing to the shaping of shapes. Walking the land braided my human pace and historic traces of humans before me together with the paces of the more-than-human world. We braided a new rhythm in the ever-changing salt marshland. Not an understandable or synchronised rhythm, but an interaction where I felt that multiple layers of time, things and processes sometimes touched each other.

Walking at a strong pace is not possible in the marsh. It is walking as searching. The marsh is one of treacherous terrain with trenches, puddles, irregularities and slippery surfaces. Your pace slows down, your feet get wet, you wipe your face with muddy hands. The distinction between me and others in the salt marsh became less clear during the weeks of walking, maybe also because of the very present watery element of the marsh. Astrida Neimanis is a cultural theorist working on the intersection of feminism and environmental change. In her book Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology she writes:

For us humans, the flow and flush of waters sustain our own bodies, but also connect them to other bodies, to other worlds beyond our human selves. Indeed, bodies of water undo the idea that bodies are necessarily or only human.¹⁸

The landscape that seemed distant and underwhelming when approached from the outside as a spectator can be the very place that reminds you of the entanglements and fuzziness of life, maybe because of waters overflowing from body to body.

Considering particularity

I remember seeing Albrecht Dürer’s work The Great Piece of Turf (1503) for the first time. Common grasses and plants were painted with such precision and care that it changed the way I saw the ordinary. Lifting it for me from repetitive and bland to being important, vibrant and magical. In contrast, landscapes that are seen as usable places, places to build on and extract from, become generalized places, such places are not valued for their subtle aesthetics, fragile ecosystems or specific and complex connections to other places and ecologies but for their potential general economic and functional value that are not specific to that place. Macfarlane describes this process as follows: “As we further deplete our ability to name, describe and figure particular aspects of our places, our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted.”¹⁹

I started focussing on shapes for longer periods: a half-hour detailed observation of a tussock with low grass vegetation, sitting down for fifteen minutes to stare at a pattern of creeks, walking the outlines of a shape I saw in the distance on a smaller scale at the place I was.

As explained earlier, one of my initial questions was if it would be possible to experience the salt marsh when not being physically in the salt marsh. My aim was to find ways to translate the particularities of the salt marsh, the testimony of specific histories and processes, to places where the physicalities of the salt marsh were not. I wanted to collect a visual language or a lexicon of salt marsh specificities through observation, like the lexicon of verbal particularities of landscape in Landmarks from Macfarlane. For this, it was important to have a large collection of particularities (shapes) because the rhythm, the language of the marsh becomes apparent in multitude.²⁰ To start the process of translation I made snapshots. The snapshots of shapes that I made were, to me, flags that marked the particularities of shapes in the memories of the landscapes I traversed. These snapshots were not “capable of relaying the frictions, layers, and inter-relations of landscape”, but they gave me a chance to go back to the marsh and dive into the knots of lines.²¹

Drawing into the meshwork of the marsh

The collection of snapshots references my memories of immersive experiences in the marsh. The frozen time of the photograph could be re-explored in the concentrated time of drawing. The drawing process unfolded layers and layers of time, even deep time. I observed the photograph intensively, as I had observed shapes whilst being in the marsh. The photograph allowed me to follow the particularities of the lifelines whilst the memory of the marsh itself also steered my gestures from time to time.

My aim was to create work and methods that had the possibility to start connections and relations with ‘salt marshness’ without necessarily visiting the marsh. Maybe this is possible when just drawing after the photos, because the process of drawing has a way of making you experience the things that you draw in a processual way. Ingold refers to the art historian Norman Bryson who said about drawing “(…) it forces everything into the open, into a field of exposure without shields or screens, with no hiding places, a radically open zone that always operates in real time” (2003, 149).²² It is this “radically open zone” that “always operates in real time” that has the capacity to explore, even from a visual, flat representation, aspects of the “production of space” and “smooth space”.

Whilst drawing in my studio, time slowed down, and I ended up in the puddles and knotted seaweeds through hours and hours of drawing. The voices that were too soft to hear before, the bodies that were too small to notice before, and the interactions that were never considered, were recognised and amplified through the process of very precise drawing.

In previous projects, I often worked with drawing materials collected from the place itself. I painted with silt and made inks and paints from algae, grass and seaweed. Here, my curiosity about complexity, relations, details, and entanglements asked for materials that would allow me to draw very detailed and precise works, something which is often not easily possible with self-made drawing materials. This would lead to an entirely different research project concerning the materials derived from the site. I decided upon black pencil and fineliner which would allow me to work on the details and contrasts and watercolour which because of its consistency and aesthetics could connect to the many elements in the shapes that involved watery textures.

The process of drawing shapes in detail entails a series of choices one needs to make when considering where to stop drawing. Where does the shape, the cluster of threads stop? In a drawing, the lines always have the possibility to continue, they are not limited by a frame. I made the choices on what to include in the shape and what not.

In Drawing #9, for instance, I zoomed in on a puddle probably shaped by the footprint of a cow. I used pencil and watercolour to capture the many layers of flattened grass and the different heights and colours of silt under the water’s surface, whilst drawing I realised that the surface structure of the water consists of illuminated reflections, reflections of the environment and shadows of overarching grasses. The shadows are sometimes black and solid which I could capture with fine liner, but sometimes also less dark with reflections and layers under the water surface shining through. The vegetation at the edges of the puddle is part of the shape I first determined because they are part of the reflections, and they sometimes bend over from the shores of the puddle into the water. I, therefore, had to make decisions on where to stop the lines I was drawing, either somewhere at the edge of the puddle or at the visual end of a stem or blade. With each line flowing out of the shape I felt the connection to the further landscape, because of the impossibility of making a rational, objective decision to stop the shape, which is much easier when drawing objects that have defined borders and edges.

In the end, I made seventy-five drawings. The drawings of participants in the art walkshops were added and their contributions made the lexicon of Land-shapes a more comprehensive visual reference work to the relations of people with the salt marshes. I think the lexicon can be two things 1) a way to, through performative observation, tap into the multiplicity in time and life of these three salt marshes and 2) a reference for further reading of the landscape and telling its stories. The participants used the same drawing materials as I did. They were asked to concentrate on the complexity and layers within the shapes as well as the challenges that drawing the borders of the shape brought forward.

The drawings connect through their lines and gestures the human and non-human processes and histories in the marsh and the maker of the drawing. The lexicon is therefore not a mere archive, but more a vocabulary.

Sooth-scapes

Although all places have invisible content, for underwhelming landscapes invisible content is as it were a ‘characteristic of absence’. It makes them so difficult to relate to when approached from an objectifying, flattening mode to turn landscape into scenery. With Land-shapes, I attempted to move away from this perspective, which denies the messiness and entanglements of a more-than-human world and enables an attitude of using the land for human needs. I tried to move to a visual approach that acknowledges the multiple voices in the marsh and understands vision as a partial, embodied and ever-changing state.

Sooth-scapes, as a concept that initiates this process, is about creating new narratives for all the actors and processes in the landscape or “speculative fabulations” as the feminist thinker and historian of science Donna Haraway calls these narratives in her book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.²³ Speculative fabulations are stories told by everyday people, filled with all kinds of human and non-human actors and even imaginary creatures. Sooth-scapes is about considering time, change and possibilities within the complexities of the landscape. It is a concept that informs you to read the speculative possibilities of the landscape (soothsaying) as well as to find through the stories in the landscape a caring, soothing attitude towards the landscape.

Stories “propose and enact patterns for participants to inhabit, somehow, on a vulnerable and wounded earth”.²⁴ The process of creating stories therefore has agency. An agency which involves responsibility for one’s visual mode or gaze, attuning to the more than human world, imaginary meaning-making and maybe even a basic form of “magic intermediary work”. David Abram introduces the notion of “magic intermediary work” to describe “magicians” who are “in service to the whole more-than-human community, and to the human collective as a part of that wider community”.²⁵

I started my Sooth-scapes journey by speculating about what the Dutch salt marsh that I studied would tell me when considering the processual element of time. Especially in salt marshes with their ever-changing circumstances, time has to be considered deeply when writing. How did the marsh change when viewed as part of a bigger timescale, and how do small processes change when affected by the tides? These thoughts and considerations deepened the materials and experiences from Land-shapes and helped me with writing a first myth, a story about the salt marshes in the North of the Netherlands.²⁶ The names of the characters are based on Old Saxon words that describe the characters. Old Saxon is a language connected to the Wadden Sea region of North Germany and the Northeast of the Netherlands. The story is about the gentle salt marsh creature Sliek, about the rich and nurturing but unpredictable and sometimes dangerous ocean Murr, about the tiny whispering shapeshifter Lüttk and the people living with the land. The story describes the landscape, starting with a specific puddle in the marsh. It is the landscape where Sliek lives. A jelly-like creature that moves with the tides and can expand and contract according to the circumstances. The people living in the landscape understand the value of Sliek because Sliek can communicate with the ocean Murr, who can be a source of prosperity for the people but who can also be dangerous. As time goes on, the people are more and more influenced by new ideas of measuring their land and protection strategies. They forget about Sliek and hide more and more behind their dikes. Sliek is pinned down and Murr is primarily seen as a force to be shielded against or a source of prosperity. But the tiny shapeshifter Lüttk is still able to transform herself into little things and whisper the messages of Sliek and Murr for the people who want to hear.

The soft, silvery light of a full moon reflected in a small puddle in the marsh. It was the quiet hour between the tides. The puddle was still, a mirror between sand fire sprouts and squiggly lugworm piles on the silt. Very slowly and very softly a layer of a gel-like consistency approached, like a translucent shadow over the marsh. It came from the sea and spread out evenly between dwarf eelgrass, over the cracks in the silt, and over the puddle. This was not water, this was not silt, this was the salt marsh creature called Sliek.

Sliek lived between the lowlands and the ocean, between silt, seaweed and seagulls. Sliek lived with the rhythms of the tides. When moon and sun enforced spring tides, Sliek spread its translucent, soft body out over miles and miles of land. Came frost and snow bite, Sliek shrunk to the size of a jellyfish. Sliek had been there from time immemorial, or at least as long as anyone could remember.²⁷

By creating an imaginative, poetic narrative I indeed felt that I wasn’t only part of processes in the landscape, but that these processes could also be played with and be a way to explore possible futures and relations, a form of imaginary meaning-making.

Just as the Land-shapes lexicon was deepened by the contributions of drawings from participants of the art walkshops, the stories I wrote are just a few in a bundle of stories by participants to writing sessions. Some participants also followed the art walkshops, others wrote stories with the Land-shapes lexicon of drawings as a source to connect to the salt marshes.

The lexicon of Land-shapes and the bundle of Sooth-scapes stories together form a testimony of experiences and relations with salt marsh landscapes. But they also attempt to contribute to an understanding of the invisible content of an, at first glance, underwhelming landscape.

Making silent voices heard

Stories about the landscape shape the way people interact with them. An abstract and theoretical description of the landscape, a distant, negative, or general depiction evokes a different attitude towards a place than a narrative that relates to human life, gives meaning and forges associations with what is invisible in the landscape.

In Landmarks, Macfarlane describes a conflict over the moor on the Isle of Lewis. A company wants to build a big wind farm on the moor and it is in the best interest of the company to describe the moor as a wasteland, a nothing place. To protect the moor, people had to “find ways of expressing the moor’s ‘invisible’ content”.²⁸ I felt that the methods stemming from Land-shapes had made some content of the salt marshes visible, with Sooth-scapes, I was expressing possible imaginary narratives of this content. I noticed that the speculative process of narrating with the landscape gave rise to feelings of care for the landscape. I refer here to the way that Maria Puig de la Bellacasa discusses “the importance of care for thinking in the more than human worlds” and the “ethical” and “political” obligations concerned with this care, but also a soothing care, a responsibility to release and ease pain.²⁹

De la Bellacasa emphasises the role of situatedness and commitment in care. In this project, I experienced this situatedness in the particularities of the landscape, the details, the nuances and the web of entanglements of actors and processes that were experienced in Land-shapes. The invisible world as a ‘characteristic by absence’ of an underwhelming landscape like a salt marsh was engaged with through attempts to discover the interactions and traces of “neglected things” specific to each place.³⁰ Analysing the drawings there seems to be a language of the salt marsh that is shared between the three salt marshes, but each marsh has its own dialect an expression of shapes specific to that particular landscape.

Another important element in care for De la Bellacasa is the concept of “speculative ethics”: speculation as a way to counteract dominant ideas of care that come from structures of power and are not sensitive to all actors in a complex web of life.³¹ An approach of speculative ethics allows for silent voices to be heard and neglected things to be seen. It is an active open-ended and flexible approach sensitive to the realities of situatedness. In retrospect, in Sooth-scapes, I attempted to find a method to make this speculative approach into an artistic action. By writing stories, I actively tried to make the experienced relations with the landscape and the revealed nuances in the landscape part of a processual way of thinking in which actors are not mere things that are discovered but play a role in a possible and maybe even magical future.

The storying process allowed for the unnoticed to raise their voices, for slow and invisible processes to be connected through time and for me as an artist, an actor, to feel actively part of the landscape. My actions, the way I make, write and express my care for these underwhelming landscapes can hopefully contribute to fostering a caring active attitude that can reach beyond my own practice.

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Linde Ex

is a visual artist, artistic researcher, and teacher. She works as an artistic PhD student at the University of Groningen and Minerva Art Academy (Hanze University of Applied Sciences). She is also a core lecturer and curriculum developer at the Fine Art and Design Master MAPs (Materials in Artistic Practices) at Frank Mohr Institute, Groningen.

linde@linde-ex.nl
linde-ex.nl

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