Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Decay and New Ecology in “A Cartography of Fantasia”
[13/11/15]
Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen and New York. His projects take the form of fieldwork documentation and development as research projects, focusing on particular environments of failed fantasises of financial speculation and the accelerated uprooting and technologization of nature. A Cartography of Fantasia harnesses his idea of ‘Utopian Tourism’.
When we met in Copenhagen, you expressed an interest in taxidermy, animals and specimens stuffed or in preservative liquids. How do you think about living beings beyond their lifetime?
There are two elements here I am interested in: Firstly the technologies used to preserve animals, and secondly the subsequent archiving of them. We have libraries of books, but we also have libraries of animals, some of which are extinct. Interestingly, the taxidermy animal becomes a subject of interpretation, because putting a deceased animal into a jar gives it a different lease of life to when it was living. Temporal consequences of preserving an animal influence your interpretation of the taxidermy.
When the animal was alive, you would experience its vitality - the way it breathes and moves. But when you look at its dead form, you can only sense traces of its way of living, implied by your existing knowledge of how it would behave. Your brain fills in the blanks and triggers your senses. I think that is why collections of preserved animals can create those moments with unexplainable gut feelings. We are living entities sensing animals trapped in time - between the living and dead. It is interesting for me to explore these subjects of decay in relation to modern information society and institutional structures. For these reasons I am particularly interested in working with specimens that are not publicly on display, but hidden away in dusty archives.
When I was a student at Central St. Martins in London, I went to the Gordon Museum to study a preserved chameleon from the 1800. I documented it through observation and drawing. The physicality of recording it with eyesight, pen and paper interested me, because it can become a physical process. After looking at the preserved dead animal for extensive periods, its vitality reached beyond its material. The dead form began to emanate outwards. Something moves inside of me when I draw an animal that some other human 170 years ago decided to put into a jar. The creature was once alive. It really feels to me as if time has become suspended somehow- but no matter how hard we try decay is inevitable. In the jar it still has skin, but it is all without colour, all brown, decomposing slowly.
Since then, I have expanded my methods to include video and digital technologies, but observation drawing remains a key component to my practice. The fundamental practice of observing, registering, interpreting and presenting are some that I think a lot about- what does it mean to research, explore and present as an artist? Since the introduction of MFA programs, cultural studies, visual culture studies and so forth, I think we have become too accustomed to think about images as surfaces imbedded with visual meanings primarily. It is highly productive and with critical potential to think about visual culture as language in an expanded sense, but when we extend this logic to the process of observing nature, we limit our understanding of human recognition to verbal logic. This may teach us about human power structures, but focusing primarily on ways of thinking about the practice of making images, we may overshadow other means of more physical and sensual cognitive processes. I try to connect the action of observing, rendering and preserving nature to societal constructs.
The silence of collections of dead animals is very interesting. I think there is something poetic to it. Collections stimulate curiosity about nature for children and adults today, which would otherwise mainly experience wild life through documentaries, the zoo or on expensive exotic travels. Humans put together collections of natural elements in scientific collections and museums. This means, that when you go to these silent libraries of specimens, you are presented with an extremely manmade interpretation of the natural world. By examining natural history collections lots can be gained in terms of understanding how we relate to and attempt to control nature on a societal scale today. I am interested in how these structures influence how we individuals, as human animals, relate to other species. I don’t feel sad, but at ease when I see these preserved animals. I feel that experiencing collections of preserved animals fills a void inside of me.
From more of a meta- perspective, I find it odd to consider that we are a species that kill to collect, preserve and display in the name of science and public education. The entire process of preserving animals is a highly cultivated and technological process. Means of preservation includes everything from taxidermy to liquid preservatives and 3D scanners today. The Natural History Museum of New York is currently experimenting with the use of 3D scanning parts of their collections. That is why I think collections with animal specimens are effective means to explore current relationships to nature. Perhaps a more fitting concept than nature would be ecology. I think that word is more adapt at including human culture and technology as part of it, as part of the ecology of today.
There is a human obsession to slowing down decay, a way of neglecting or perhaps trying to understand relationships between death and time. So to reflect on these issues today I have experimented a bit with 3D scanning dead animals, but without making any form of after editing. I let the scanner and software entirely interpret the creature.
When you put an animal in a jar, it is not the same as stuffing an animal. A person making taxidermy gives animals human gestures by creating certain poses, which we read based on our cultural background. Dioramas are great examples of this. I think they are primarily symptoms of particular kinds of imaginations of nature that have existed since the 1800. However, when an animal is simply put into a jar it becomes something entirely different. It becomes something that exists between human intention, and the inevitable decay of everything living. The figure and expression of the animal will position itself inside of the jar in ways which are less the result of human gesticulation when compared to stuffed animals.
How do these ideas translate to your current project, “The Cartography of Fantasia”, which concerns semi-built and abandoned environments?
This summer, I completed a six-week residency in Blanca, Spain. It is a desert landscape with many abandoned tourist resorts that were built between 2008 and 2011. Some of those I documented haven’t even been used at all, due to corruption and financial speculation by banks from Portugal and Germany. It is a massive centrally organized scheme. These schemes have created a layer of rot on the physical landscape in the form of decaying new buildings. It was a fictional paradise on the drawing board, which never became a reality. That is why the work combines satellite images, as symbols of a central- technocratic power structure, combined with animal perspectives and with my own recordings of the areas I visited. These concepts are products of modernism and ideas about progress, but ecological transformations have often been taken out of those equations. I believe that it is unhealthy to think that economy, culture, industry and ecology should be seen as divided. They are all intertwined into one massive symbiosis today. I think the post-apocalyptic landscape in A Cartography of Fantasia documents what can happen at an even larger scale in the future, if we fail to realize how the symbiosis I described before works.
I hope the societal systemic that has led to the conversion of the landscape documented in the work A Cartography of Fantasia will break down. Decay like an old ecosystem that is no longer adapted to current situations. From decay new forms of life emerge, and new ecosystems take over. I hope this is what we will be seeing with the new left wing movements challenging the conservative power structures in Southern Europe. The power structures that have allowed these kinds of massive landscapes with decaying concrete buildings, tourist resorts and airports to exist. This is literally what has happened in Southern Spain. The entire landscape and ecosystem has taken a new form, because of financial speculation and recession. As seen in the video a living rabbit overlooks the vast abandoned airport Corvera. I sometimes slept inside of a tent at the abandoned tourist resorts, and I filmed for hours a day in a 40 degree sun. But in the end I think I got some relevant footage that I edited together to make a 2 screen video installation.
Take the palm trees at the abandoned tourist resorts as examples of life in this new ecosystem. From 1993 Egyptian palm trees were imported by contractors to Southern Europe and Spain, because they were considered commodities. They were cheaper than the native date palm trees, grew faster, and functioned as perfect tropes for the tropical. However, the palm trees carried with them an invasive weevil that nearly eradicated all local date palm trees of Southern Europe. A weevil is a type of insect living from the palm trees, and they spread a disease form the resilient Egyptian palm trees to the non- resilient local date palms. As a tourist, you don’t know these landscape facts, but when you go on vocation you buy into the idea of the palm tree as being part of the tropical. The people who imported it to grow here acted as if they were just dragging and dropping trees. They did it from satellite perspective far away from the ecological reality of Murcia. They did it everywhere in Southern Europe without thinking about the ecological consequences. I think this is only possible when single components in nature are considered commodities, without thinking about them as biological entities functioning within a larger system.
There is a sort of “romantic” (as in romanticism) way of looking at nature in what I proclaim, I think. I believe it is important that we become able to think about the whole in relation to the single detail, but without notions of “original nature” and “harmony” as popular during the romantic period. But I think we can still learn from that vision of nature- both in terms of recognizing its power over us, and in terms of accepting and actively seek to understand, how our individual lives, consumption and large scale economic systems have become tied to the life of everything- down to single celled organisms.
That is why I have included drawings of insects akin to 1800 natural illustrations, combined with satellite recordings and first person perspectives of the nature I explored in A Cartography of Fantasia. All these perspectives melt together into a journey in the work, which you experience as a viewer. The work is not meant to be a video with a clear a to b narrative, but instead an installation with 2 screens, drawings and 3D scanned animals that you experience as separate elements that nonetheless influence one another.
What you mentioned about palm trees sounds quite similar to playing the computer game Rollercoaster Tycoon, where you can plant trees from a selection on a drop down list and build whatever you like, and hope for a positive economic return. The obvious problem is that you can’t just delete and restart a bad game in reality and decay takes control when you fail.
Yes and the trouble is that people in “Western” countries increasingly think of the world this way. I know a range of artists who entirely embrace and nearly celebrate the virtual, digital, synthetic etc. as if they are transcendental. But I do not buy this. I don’t think older views of nature become obsolete, simply because they are “old” and critical of the way things seem to be going. I think our perception of ecology has become entirely intertwined with technological imagining techniques and commercial interests, yes. But I also think critical distance is important. I also think that to create such distance, it is important not to get too caught up in following particular discursive paths when you explore the current ecology of the world as an artist. I believe a sense of actual exploration in my practice is important, explorations that take place outside of my own studio.
Rarely do people realize that palm trees in many areas are non-native and only there because they are artificially kept alive. As seen in the video, the palm trees are connected to these black tubes that transport water from reservoirs in the middle of the desert. This is a global industry and method of having palm trees in ecosystems where they cannot otherwise survive. I focus a lot on how the palm trees have been planted in the video, because they are symptoms of how we plan and speculate as humans on a much larger scale.
To comment on the virtual vs. the real, I intentionally brought in the elements of video gaming into my documentation of real financial problem and ecological transformations. I also found that screen based entertainment grew exponentially in Spain 2008-2015 and it is now the second largest market place in Europe. At the same time as 22% are unemployed, 50% of which are our generation. And landscapes have been converted into post-apocalyptic concrete blocks in desert areas because of North European fantasies about a tropical South. Fantasies closely associated with tourist industries and not only their imaging activities, but also their physical transformations of landscapes.
We have an intense computer culture where we are constantly within our minds or in virtual commercial spaces that have become intertwined with our imaginations. But there’s so much in our heads that when we try to convert mental images into physical form, it doesn’t work as we imagined. Maybe there is a bit of humour or satire in this work that contemplates the mixture of hope, failure and sadness. Too many people spend their time imagining their futures, utopia or their careers. This dreaming and escapism may be hindering a sense of activism in reality.
The region of Murcia where I filmed has more in common with the landscape of northern Africa than what most imagine to be part of “Europe”. It is really a barren place. It is 40 degrees and above in the summer, there is no rain, and the resorts I visited are built in the middle of harsh deserts hundred kilometres from the ocean. It is to me a symptom of how we imagine and create fictional landscapes in movies, documentaries, in art and for tourism. It becomes a political issue for the locals, when you consider the state of unemployment in Spain and the speculation schemes between North European banks and Spanish contractors certainly ruined what were optimistic possibilities for millions of people.
Why were these resorts never used and left to decay, and how does it parallel with the natural world?
It’s very similar to what happened in Greece. Local contractors in Blanca, Spain, worked with the local municipality to begin developing the local area. They receive funding from several banks; many of these were from Germany and one from Portugal. The problem surfaces when the person orchestrating it all is also the owner of the construction companies. Once he pays his own companies, in other words himself, with money guaranteed by the municipalities, he leaves the project. The project becomes bankrupt and taxpayers have to pay up.
The names of the contractors and the companies are publicly known. However the locals failed to receive compensation and justice against the contractor. This has happened on a large scale in Spain and all over Southern Europe because the banks of Northern Europe have too much power. The companies do a great deal to avoid being visible in the media too, when projects fail and taxpayers have to suffer. In the video work I visit the abandoned airport “Corvera”, built by the global Spanish construction company Sacyr. However, if you go to Google Street view and visit the airport, the company has censored their entire visible presence by fading out all signs and posters. They take great care to erase their traces.
I met a guy who runs a video art centre in Murcia. He has a map with more than a hundred abandoned locations like the airport. La Terica is one of the locations my current project focuses on, and it contains thousands of unoccupied apartments. La Tercia was meant to be a big golf and tourist resort. The apartments are far out in the desert, in an absolutely remote area without natural water or much vegetation. Now there are invasive palm tree species everywhere and new organisms are thriving. I spoke to a couple of Britons who spent all their money on buying a property there. They lost it all, along with the vision of the tropical fantasy. Now, they have no choice but to keep their dream alive by sustaining the property, because they have invested so much money and hope into it. But right next to their house is a big building that has completely collapsed. The couple live 30km from the nearest town, which itself is tiny and only has a hundred people or so and one shop. It’s entirely like a fantasy landscape that’s gone nightmarishly wrong.
Similar to how I feel about the preserved animals, these holiday landscapes have a superficial air, and below there is decay and failure. The taxidermy animals and landscapes of Murcia Look as they now do, because of modern cultural activities. In the work A Cartography of Fantasia, you are introduced to the area explored from outer space, and the work has no narrator or a single human figure. I somehow think that we are animals on this planet in some way. However, and to return to your question, new species, bees, rabbits, palm trees and a long list of other organisms are now thriving in this manmade landscapes. I see a sense of beauty in a world without humans, where other organisms flourish.
You made a parallel between decay in the buildings and the decay of the natural specimens. Buildings are man-made and are difficult to decompose of, so the materials are considered waste. Differently, the decay of organic waste remains consumable by other organisms. How do you consider the process of decay in these two different ecologies and how can you make further parallels?
Rejuvenation is a key word for what I was thinking about in Spain during the residency. All the works I made have a very green and tropical colour that we use a lot nowadays to think about rejuvenation. In these ruins, plants and spiders’ webs grow. So in the work I introduce each location visited with a digital interface, which explains what humans imagined it to be. Corvera was imagined to be an “airport”, but I portray it like a wild life habitat. There is a huge fence all around the airport that forbids people to enter. The airport covers an area of 3x4 kilometres, and it is filled with eagles, rabbits and other animals that live here
On site, a huge tunnel housed many rabbits and these surroundings have somehow become the rock and mountain habitats for animals- they sleep, eat and hide in this post-human landscape. It is funny to me, that an area that by humans could be seen as post-apocalyptic can be vivid and alive when examined through the eyes of other species. This seems to be the animals’ turn of preserving man-made materials. In taking over the man-made structures they create their own zoology museum of human artefacts. Artificial conversion of desert landscapes into tropical tourist resorts have allowed for other creatures to thrive. The buildings rot, but they also function like caves in a mountain. The water reservoirs are no longer capable of providing drinkable water for humans, but you can find plenty of birds’ nests, bees, flowers and invasive palm trees all around. So in the work I summarize how this entire landscape is constructed.
Why do you use the animal’s perspective in your video as opposed to a human’s?
I want to challenge anthropocentric ways of examining the ecological consequences of current financial and political large scale systemic. As mentioned previously, I am interested in how human activities such as financial speculation influence the ecology of an entire landscape. Political elements of corruption and the presence of toxic waste merge together if you pay attention to the footage itself. If you actively look at the landscape and notice how shadows fall, where palm trees stand and so forth. These details will reveal to you the nature and history of the landscape. At a scene in the video you see 4 kilometres of palm trees standing, drying, and slowly dying, in the sun- in the middle of the desert. That is entirely a product of the speculation processes I described before. If you look you find traces as even financial speculation has a physical side to it.
So if you go explore a landscape with too preconceived ideas as an artist, I think it is limited how much you will actually learn about the site you explore. The landscape in A Cartography of Fantasia is the product of a modern nature I, as a human, am a part of. I’m making “The Cartography of Fantasia” as an installation that I want people to feel like they are a part of this modern nature, which is equally concrete, digital and natural.
On a daily basis, most people see their potted plants or a pigeon as part of the segmented nature that is available to them. This idea I feel relates to the video work I’m making, because we’re living with divisions of nature and man-made structures, and we have to let our imagination, or an animal perspective, fill in what the natural world would really look like. The video also has a high degree of randomness, in the sense that shots are edited together by me very intuitively. I have 16 hours of footage, and the video is about 16 minutes. So that is about 1% of the total footage included. This is not supposed to be a film, but a large scale installation where you must use your senses, as you watch actively to learn about the landscape. If I controlled the story of the video too much, it would lose its non-human perspectives. For the same reason the work has no human figure or human speaking.
It is worth mentioning that I originally went to Murcia to create a work about being a delusional individual escaping reality. Once I started to explore the landscape of Murcia through my lens, I realized it was much more interesting to simply let go and record freely- Rather than travelling to locations with preconceived agendas. The equivalence would be for an anthropologist to write about a culture based on what he would like to mirror in his own world, rather than trying actively to understand the social dynamics of the people he examines. When it comes to art that investigates ecological changes, I think these things are important to keep in mind. Nature, culture and technology might have become totally intertwined with our individual lives, but biology has some brutal basic mechanisms worth remembering.
We’re always looking at our phones and apps to understand things. By referencing these app-like features in your video, such as the GPS mapping, it is as if you’re comforting the viewers in two ways. Firstly, they give people confidence in the information supplied, and secondly, this digital language speaks to their understanding quickly and instinctively.
Yes, I thought a lot about how I would present the areas visited. I did not want to make it look as if nature exists there on its own. I wanted the different technological, animal and financial speculation views to merge with one another. So I introduce a digital interface that examines the locations in a slightly non-human, but computational way. An abandoned greenhouse becomes a “rejuvenation facility”, and the tourist resort “La Tercia” an invasive palm tree incubator. I introduce the originally intended function of each location as products of humanoid imagination. So the interface tells you that, according to humanoid fantasy, Corvera is an airport, but the interface interprets it as a wildlife habitat.
I do this because I think many today can relate easier to nature, if they see it through some slightly digital format. It is as if recordings of nature with a digital interface feel more natural today to me and many of my generation, than a recording without. I think our realities have become altered by the virtual, and we fail at times to connect with the offline reality which can be quite brutal because of its biological foundation. A foundation that can change our lives in ways the virtual cannot. This is the reason of my work play with the realities we perceive. Sometimes I imagine that we are aliens on this planet.
All images and the video are by Jakob Kudsk Steensen from “A Cartography of Fantasia”.
Worm is working with Jakob on something interesting for Spring 2016.
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Website: www.jakobsteensen.squarespace.com
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Jakob Kudsk Steensen is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen and New York. His projects take the form of fieldwork documentation and development as research projects, focusing on particular environments of failed fantasises of financial speculation and the accelerated uprooting and technologization of nature. A Cartography of Fantasia harnesses his idea of ‘Utopian Tourism’.
When we met in Copenhagen, you expressed an interest in taxidermy, animals and specimens stuffed or in preservative liquids. How do you think about living beings beyond their lifetime?
There are two elements here I am interested in: Firstly the technologies used to preserve animals, and secondly the subsequent archiving of them. We have libraries of books, but we also have libraries of animals, some of which are extinct. Interestingly, the taxidermy animal becomes a subject of interpretation, because putting a deceased animal into a jar gives it a different lease of life to when it was living. Temporal consequences of preserving an animal influence your interpretation of the taxidermy.
When the animal was alive, you would experience its vitality - the way it breathes and moves. But when you look at its dead form, you can only sense traces of its way of living, implied by your existing knowledge of how it would behave. Your brain fills in the blanks and triggers your senses. I think that is why collections of preserved animals can create those moments with unexplainable gut feelings. We are living entities sensing animals trapped in time - between the living and dead. It is interesting for me to explore these subjects of decay in relation to modern information society and institutional structures. For these reasons I am particularly interested in working with specimens that are not publicly on display, but hidden away in dusty archives.
When I was a student at Central St. Martins in London, I went to the Gordon Museum to study a preserved chameleon from the 1800. I documented it through observation and drawing. The physicality of recording it with eyesight, pen and paper interested me, because it can become a physical process. After looking at the preserved dead animal for extensive periods, its vitality reached beyond its material. The dead form began to emanate outwards. Something moves inside of me when I draw an animal that some other human 170 years ago decided to put into a jar. The creature was once alive. It really feels to me as if time has become suspended somehow- but no matter how hard we try decay is inevitable. In the jar it still has skin, but it is all without colour, all brown, decomposing slowly.
Since then, I have expanded my methods to include video and digital technologies, but observation drawing remains a key component to my practice. The fundamental practice of observing, registering, interpreting and presenting are some that I think a lot about- what does it mean to research, explore and present as an artist? Since the introduction of MFA programs, cultural studies, visual culture studies and so forth, I think we have become too accustomed to think about images as surfaces imbedded with visual meanings primarily. It is highly productive and with critical potential to think about visual culture as language in an expanded sense, but when we extend this logic to the process of observing nature, we limit our understanding of human recognition to verbal logic. This may teach us about human power structures, but focusing primarily on ways of thinking about the practice of making images, we may overshadow other means of more physical and sensual cognitive processes. I try to connect the action of observing, rendering and preserving nature to societal constructs.
The silence of collections of dead animals is very interesting. I think there is something poetic to it. Collections stimulate curiosity about nature for children and adults today, which would otherwise mainly experience wild life through documentaries, the zoo or on expensive exotic travels. Humans put together collections of natural elements in scientific collections and museums. This means, that when you go to these silent libraries of specimens, you are presented with an extremely manmade interpretation of the natural world. By examining natural history collections lots can be gained in terms of understanding how we relate to and attempt to control nature on a societal scale today. I am interested in how these structures influence how we individuals, as human animals, relate to other species. I don’t feel sad, but at ease when I see these preserved animals. I feel that experiencing collections of preserved animals fills a void inside of me.
From more of a meta- perspective, I find it odd to consider that we are a species that kill to collect, preserve and display in the name of science and public education. The entire process of preserving animals is a highly cultivated and technological process. Means of preservation includes everything from taxidermy to liquid preservatives and 3D scanners today. The Natural History Museum of New York is currently experimenting with the use of 3D scanning parts of their collections. That is why I think collections with animal specimens are effective means to explore current relationships to nature. Perhaps a more fitting concept than nature would be ecology. I think that word is more adapt at including human culture and technology as part of it, as part of the ecology of today.
There is a human obsession to slowing down decay, a way of neglecting or perhaps trying to understand relationships between death and time. So to reflect on these issues today I have experimented a bit with 3D scanning dead animals, but without making any form of after editing. I let the scanner and software entirely interpret the creature.
When you put an animal in a jar, it is not the same as stuffing an animal. A person making taxidermy gives animals human gestures by creating certain poses, which we read based on our cultural background. Dioramas are great examples of this. I think they are primarily symptoms of particular kinds of imaginations of nature that have existed since the 1800. However, when an animal is simply put into a jar it becomes something entirely different. It becomes something that exists between human intention, and the inevitable decay of everything living. The figure and expression of the animal will position itself inside of the jar in ways which are less the result of human gesticulation when compared to stuffed animals.
A Cartography of Fantasia- Single screen demonstration from Jakob Kudsk Steensen on Vimeo.
How do these ideas translate to your current project, “The Cartography of Fantasia”, which concerns semi-built and abandoned environments?
This summer, I completed a six-week residency in Blanca, Spain. It is a desert landscape with many abandoned tourist resorts that were built between 2008 and 2011. Some of those I documented haven’t even been used at all, due to corruption and financial speculation by banks from Portugal and Germany. It is a massive centrally organized scheme. These schemes have created a layer of rot on the physical landscape in the form of decaying new buildings. It was a fictional paradise on the drawing board, which never became a reality. That is why the work combines satellite images, as symbols of a central- technocratic power structure, combined with animal perspectives and with my own recordings of the areas I visited. These concepts are products of modernism and ideas about progress, but ecological transformations have often been taken out of those equations. I believe that it is unhealthy to think that economy, culture, industry and ecology should be seen as divided. They are all intertwined into one massive symbiosis today. I think the post-apocalyptic landscape in A Cartography of Fantasia documents what can happen at an even larger scale in the future, if we fail to realize how the symbiosis I described before works.
I hope the societal systemic that has led to the conversion of the landscape documented in the work A Cartography of Fantasia will break down. Decay like an old ecosystem that is no longer adapted to current situations. From decay new forms of life emerge, and new ecosystems take over. I hope this is what we will be seeing with the new left wing movements challenging the conservative power structures in Southern Europe. The power structures that have allowed these kinds of massive landscapes with decaying concrete buildings, tourist resorts and airports to exist. This is literally what has happened in Southern Spain. The entire landscape and ecosystem has taken a new form, because of financial speculation and recession. As seen in the video a living rabbit overlooks the vast abandoned airport Corvera. I sometimes slept inside of a tent at the abandoned tourist resorts, and I filmed for hours a day in a 40 degree sun. But in the end I think I got some relevant footage that I edited together to make a 2 screen video installation.
Take the palm trees at the abandoned tourist resorts as examples of life in this new ecosystem. From 1993 Egyptian palm trees were imported by contractors to Southern Europe and Spain, because they were considered commodities. They were cheaper than the native date palm trees, grew faster, and functioned as perfect tropes for the tropical. However, the palm trees carried with them an invasive weevil that nearly eradicated all local date palm trees of Southern Europe. A weevil is a type of insect living from the palm trees, and they spread a disease form the resilient Egyptian palm trees to the non- resilient local date palms. As a tourist, you don’t know these landscape facts, but when you go on vocation you buy into the idea of the palm tree as being part of the tropical. The people who imported it to grow here acted as if they were just dragging and dropping trees. They did it from satellite perspective far away from the ecological reality of Murcia. They did it everywhere in Southern Europe without thinking about the ecological consequences. I think this is only possible when single components in nature are considered commodities, without thinking about them as biological entities functioning within a larger system.
There is a sort of “romantic” (as in romanticism) way of looking at nature in what I proclaim, I think. I believe it is important that we become able to think about the whole in relation to the single detail, but without notions of “original nature” and “harmony” as popular during the romantic period. But I think we can still learn from that vision of nature- both in terms of recognizing its power over us, and in terms of accepting and actively seek to understand, how our individual lives, consumption and large scale economic systems have become tied to the life of everything- down to single celled organisms.
That is why I have included drawings of insects akin to 1800 natural illustrations, combined with satellite recordings and first person perspectives of the nature I explored in A Cartography of Fantasia. All these perspectives melt together into a journey in the work, which you experience as a viewer. The work is not meant to be a video with a clear a to b narrative, but instead an installation with 2 screens, drawings and 3D scanned animals that you experience as separate elements that nonetheless influence one another.
What you mentioned about palm trees sounds quite similar to playing the computer game Rollercoaster Tycoon, where you can plant trees from a selection on a drop down list and build whatever you like, and hope for a positive economic return. The obvious problem is that you can’t just delete and restart a bad game in reality and decay takes control when you fail.
Yes and the trouble is that people in “Western” countries increasingly think of the world this way. I know a range of artists who entirely embrace and nearly celebrate the virtual, digital, synthetic etc. as if they are transcendental. But I do not buy this. I don’t think older views of nature become obsolete, simply because they are “old” and critical of the way things seem to be going. I think our perception of ecology has become entirely intertwined with technological imagining techniques and commercial interests, yes. But I also think critical distance is important. I also think that to create such distance, it is important not to get too caught up in following particular discursive paths when you explore the current ecology of the world as an artist. I believe a sense of actual exploration in my practice is important, explorations that take place outside of my own studio.
Rarely do people realize that palm trees in many areas are non-native and only there because they are artificially kept alive. As seen in the video, the palm trees are connected to these black tubes that transport water from reservoirs in the middle of the desert. This is a global industry and method of having palm trees in ecosystems where they cannot otherwise survive. I focus a lot on how the palm trees have been planted in the video, because they are symptoms of how we plan and speculate as humans on a much larger scale.
To comment on the virtual vs. the real, I intentionally brought in the elements of video gaming into my documentation of real financial problem and ecological transformations. I also found that screen based entertainment grew exponentially in Spain 2008-2015 and it is now the second largest market place in Europe. At the same time as 22% are unemployed, 50% of which are our generation. And landscapes have been converted into post-apocalyptic concrete blocks in desert areas because of North European fantasies about a tropical South. Fantasies closely associated with tourist industries and not only their imaging activities, but also their physical transformations of landscapes.
We have an intense computer culture where we are constantly within our minds or in virtual commercial spaces that have become intertwined with our imaginations. But there’s so much in our heads that when we try to convert mental images into physical form, it doesn’t work as we imagined. Maybe there is a bit of humour or satire in this work that contemplates the mixture of hope, failure and sadness. Too many people spend their time imagining their futures, utopia or their careers. This dreaming and escapism may be hindering a sense of activism in reality.
The region of Murcia where I filmed has more in common with the landscape of northern Africa than what most imagine to be part of “Europe”. It is really a barren place. It is 40 degrees and above in the summer, there is no rain, and the resorts I visited are built in the middle of harsh deserts hundred kilometres from the ocean. It is to me a symptom of how we imagine and create fictional landscapes in movies, documentaries, in art and for tourism. It becomes a political issue for the locals, when you consider the state of unemployment in Spain and the speculation schemes between North European banks and Spanish contractors certainly ruined what were optimistic possibilities for millions of people.
Why were these resorts never used and left to decay, and how does it parallel with the natural world?
It’s very similar to what happened in Greece. Local contractors in Blanca, Spain, worked with the local municipality to begin developing the local area. They receive funding from several banks; many of these were from Germany and one from Portugal. The problem surfaces when the person orchestrating it all is also the owner of the construction companies. Once he pays his own companies, in other words himself, with money guaranteed by the municipalities, he leaves the project. The project becomes bankrupt and taxpayers have to pay up.
The names of the contractors and the companies are publicly known. However the locals failed to receive compensation and justice against the contractor. This has happened on a large scale in Spain and all over Southern Europe because the banks of Northern Europe have too much power. The companies do a great deal to avoid being visible in the media too, when projects fail and taxpayers have to suffer. In the video work I visit the abandoned airport “Corvera”, built by the global Spanish construction company Sacyr. However, if you go to Google Street view and visit the airport, the company has censored their entire visible presence by fading out all signs and posters. They take great care to erase their traces.
I met a guy who runs a video art centre in Murcia. He has a map with more than a hundred abandoned locations like the airport. La Terica is one of the locations my current project focuses on, and it contains thousands of unoccupied apartments. La Tercia was meant to be a big golf and tourist resort. The apartments are far out in the desert, in an absolutely remote area without natural water or much vegetation. Now there are invasive palm tree species everywhere and new organisms are thriving. I spoke to a couple of Britons who spent all their money on buying a property there. They lost it all, along with the vision of the tropical fantasy. Now, they have no choice but to keep their dream alive by sustaining the property, because they have invested so much money and hope into it. But right next to their house is a big building that has completely collapsed. The couple live 30km from the nearest town, which itself is tiny and only has a hundred people or so and one shop. It’s entirely like a fantasy landscape that’s gone nightmarishly wrong.
Similar to how I feel about the preserved animals, these holiday landscapes have a superficial air, and below there is decay and failure. The taxidermy animals and landscapes of Murcia Look as they now do, because of modern cultural activities. In the work A Cartography of Fantasia, you are introduced to the area explored from outer space, and the work has no narrator or a single human figure. I somehow think that we are animals on this planet in some way. However, and to return to your question, new species, bees, rabbits, palm trees and a long list of other organisms are now thriving in this manmade landscapes. I see a sense of beauty in a world without humans, where other organisms flourish.
You made a parallel between decay in the buildings and the decay of the natural specimens. Buildings are man-made and are difficult to decompose of, so the materials are considered waste. Differently, the decay of organic waste remains consumable by other organisms. How do you consider the process of decay in these two different ecologies and how can you make further parallels?
Rejuvenation is a key word for what I was thinking about in Spain during the residency. All the works I made have a very green and tropical colour that we use a lot nowadays to think about rejuvenation. In these ruins, plants and spiders’ webs grow. So in the work I introduce each location visited with a digital interface, which explains what humans imagined it to be. Corvera was imagined to be an “airport”, but I portray it like a wild life habitat. There is a huge fence all around the airport that forbids people to enter. The airport covers an area of 3x4 kilometres, and it is filled with eagles, rabbits and other animals that live here
On site, a huge tunnel housed many rabbits and these surroundings have somehow become the rock and mountain habitats for animals- they sleep, eat and hide in this post-human landscape. It is funny to me, that an area that by humans could be seen as post-apocalyptic can be vivid and alive when examined through the eyes of other species. This seems to be the animals’ turn of preserving man-made materials. In taking over the man-made structures they create their own zoology museum of human artefacts. Artificial conversion of desert landscapes into tropical tourist resorts have allowed for other creatures to thrive. The buildings rot, but they also function like caves in a mountain. The water reservoirs are no longer capable of providing drinkable water for humans, but you can find plenty of birds’ nests, bees, flowers and invasive palm trees all around. So in the work I summarize how this entire landscape is constructed.
Why do you use the animal’s perspective in your video as opposed to a human’s?
I want to challenge anthropocentric ways of examining the ecological consequences of current financial and political large scale systemic. As mentioned previously, I am interested in how human activities such as financial speculation influence the ecology of an entire landscape. Political elements of corruption and the presence of toxic waste merge together if you pay attention to the footage itself. If you actively look at the landscape and notice how shadows fall, where palm trees stand and so forth. These details will reveal to you the nature and history of the landscape. At a scene in the video you see 4 kilometres of palm trees standing, drying, and slowly dying, in the sun- in the middle of the desert. That is entirely a product of the speculation processes I described before. If you look you find traces as even financial speculation has a physical side to it.
So if you go explore a landscape with too preconceived ideas as an artist, I think it is limited how much you will actually learn about the site you explore. The landscape in A Cartography of Fantasia is the product of a modern nature I, as a human, am a part of. I’m making “The Cartography of Fantasia” as an installation that I want people to feel like they are a part of this modern nature, which is equally concrete, digital and natural.
On a daily basis, most people see their potted plants or a pigeon as part of the segmented nature that is available to them. This idea I feel relates to the video work I’m making, because we’re living with divisions of nature and man-made structures, and we have to let our imagination, or an animal perspective, fill in what the natural world would really look like. The video also has a high degree of randomness, in the sense that shots are edited together by me very intuitively. I have 16 hours of footage, and the video is about 16 minutes. So that is about 1% of the total footage included. This is not supposed to be a film, but a large scale installation where you must use your senses, as you watch actively to learn about the landscape. If I controlled the story of the video too much, it would lose its non-human perspectives. For the same reason the work has no human figure or human speaking.
It is worth mentioning that I originally went to Murcia to create a work about being a delusional individual escaping reality. Once I started to explore the landscape of Murcia through my lens, I realized it was much more interesting to simply let go and record freely- Rather than travelling to locations with preconceived agendas. The equivalence would be for an anthropologist to write about a culture based on what he would like to mirror in his own world, rather than trying actively to understand the social dynamics of the people he examines. When it comes to art that investigates ecological changes, I think these things are important to keep in mind. Nature, culture and technology might have become totally intertwined with our individual lives, but biology has some brutal basic mechanisms worth remembering.
We’re always looking at our phones and apps to understand things. By referencing these app-like features in your video, such as the GPS mapping, it is as if you’re comforting the viewers in two ways. Firstly, they give people confidence in the information supplied, and secondly, this digital language speaks to their understanding quickly and instinctively.
Yes, I thought a lot about how I would present the areas visited. I did not want to make it look as if nature exists there on its own. I wanted the different technological, animal and financial speculation views to merge with one another. So I introduce a digital interface that examines the locations in a slightly non-human, but computational way. An abandoned greenhouse becomes a “rejuvenation facility”, and the tourist resort “La Tercia” an invasive palm tree incubator. I introduce the originally intended function of each location as products of humanoid imagination. So the interface tells you that, according to humanoid fantasy, Corvera is an airport, but the interface interprets it as a wildlife habitat.
I do this because I think many today can relate easier to nature, if they see it through some slightly digital format. It is as if recordings of nature with a digital interface feel more natural today to me and many of my generation, than a recording without. I think our realities have become altered by the virtual, and we fail at times to connect with the offline reality which can be quite brutal because of its biological foundation. A foundation that can change our lives in ways the virtual cannot. This is the reason of my work play with the realities we perceive. Sometimes I imagine that we are aliens on this planet.
All images and the video are by Jakob Kudsk Steensen from “A Cartography of Fantasia”.
Worm is working with Jakob on something interesting for Spring 2016.
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