ELINE DE CLERCQ: art and ecology

Showing posts with label art and ecology. Show all posts

ARCUS research residency

I'm incredibly grateful to have been accepted as an artistic researcher to ARCUS residency, one of the oldest residency organisations in Japan. Since 1994 they are hosting a year-round program with international artists. This summer I will visit the old school building in Ibaraki, travel to visit the beautiful gardens around Kyoto and Tokyo, and write about many of the connections between art and nature.

Here is a link to find out more about ARCUS: https://www.arcus-project.com/en/about/

Image courtesy of the website by ARCUS
https://www.arcus-project.com/en/news/call-for-application/

Japan is a place with so much sense of aesthetics, care, social awareness, progressive innovations and conserving traditions; what role is there for contemporary artists? And how does ecology affect our practices? In 2023 I started the two-year project 'Making Sense', my artistic research on restoring ecology in the old Academy garden. This multispecies collective practice aims to create a community garden with students and the non-human garden residents like trees, birds, fungi and perennials. We're thinking together, it is the garden who makes us into gardeners. This summer I will learn about the gardens in Japan, where this artistic practice is centuries old and still very much alive. I look forward to open up my research into a more global perspective and create new string figures with artists in Japan and the garden in the Royal Academy of Antwerp.

This artistic residency is made possible with the support of Flanders.

I would like to thank the ARCUS committee to welcome me in Ibaraki and give me this opportunity. I'm very grateful for the support I got from the Royal Academy and the Artistic Research Department to extend my research into Japanese gardens and culture. Thank you Flanders Arts & Culture for your support, I have been granted the residency funding. I'm grateful to work as a visual artist and researcher in the field of art & ecology.

Me, in 1981 in Japan.

This is not the first time I visit Japan, when I was two years old I spent some time in Japan as a tourist. I don't remember anything, although it must have been a wonderful experience. The photo above is testimony of typical tourist behaviour where cultures are appropriated, I am not Japanese. But it is through traveling that I learned what it means to be the other, to learn what makes me so typical for being from Antwerp. Abroad I could learn what I could not learn here about my own culture.

My past makes me prudent with taking on habits from other cultures. I grew up in a mix of styles unlike the 'usual' Belgian household. I was twenty-five years old when I first order French fries in a chip shop in Antwerp because my parents raised me on a macrobiotic diet that wasn't Japanese nor local. I don't know what a typical Flemish youth is, with spagetti bolognese and koffiekoeken (Danish pastry) and I don't know what it means to be from somewhere else. But I do know so many people grow up with these mixed cultures that it is our own lived experiences that make us from here.

A String Figure Patch

The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp presents Ecosystems, an exhibition on ecology and art. 20 October - 9 November 2023

With the exhibition ‘Ecosystems. Science – Art – Activism’ at the Lange Zaal, we bring historical and contemporary 'eco-art' into the school walls, not only as a source of inspiration, but also as food for critical thought, and as a stimulus for future artistic practices. We present printed matter from the Earth-, Land- and Eco-Art Era of the 1960s-1980s, as well as environmental work of Patricia Johanson, one of the first female artists making in situ works based on science and ecology. Further in the exhibition the ‘Portable Orchard’ by the eco-art pioneers The Harrisons is brought to life again in collabortation with students. We also look to the contemporary artistic research field at our Academy. Works of the artists Tim Theo Deceuninck, Mirja Busch, Jarek Lustych, Sascha Herrmann, Dries Segers, Eline De Clercq, Saskia Van der Gucht, Kristof Timmerman, Peter Lemmens and Jeroen Cluckers are on show. (Text by Roel Arekesteijn, ARTICULATE, 2023)

set up of the String Figure Patch within the exhibition Ecosystems

Garden Table, String Figure Patch, Artists publication

Eline De Clercq & Saskia Van der Gucht, a collaboration in artistic researches.

During ARTICULATE, the garden community of the Academy will have a garden table set up in the exhibition in the Lange Zaal. In 2022, Eline De Clercq started a community garden in the Academy’s old garden, where weekly sessions are organised with students and artists. This artistic research project on art and ecology functions as an informal learning environment about climate change, gender norms, decolonisation and intersectionalism.

On the garden table you will find working texts, books, seeds, tools and more: a gathering of objects and ideas on what it means to work with nature within an artistic practice. On a small side table is the artist edition poster about last year's research 'The Sympoiesis Garden' printed with Track Report: a map of the start of this garden project with patches of words and a path for the reader to follow.

On the floor in the middle of a string figure patch is a presentation of the work On Sand, three ceramic biotope dishes were made during a collaborative research project with Saskia Van der Gucht (researcher at Sint Lucas Antwerpen) and Eline De Clercq. These containers holds sand carried by the wind to Antwerp more than 10,000 years ago, during the most recent glacial time. With the help of archaeologists, the artists were able to retrieve this sand from the dig site in Antwerp’s Leftbank area, right at the heart of the PFAS pollution, buried under layers of land and history. The material holds aspects of care, habitation, touch and invisibility. In the clay receptacle the sand is once again given the opportunity to become a habitat for plants and animals. It’s not a reconstruction of the original fauna and flora, it’s a curiosity-fuelled ‘what if’ situation: the artists want to look after and care for the sand like a miniature nature reserve.

You can visit the community garden via the Academy's main entrance at Mutsaardstraat.

IG @royalacademyantwerpgarden

The Sympoiesis Garden.

An Art & Ecology project and research into gardening as artistic practice.

In September 2022 I started a one year research at the Royal Academy of Antwerp. For the duration of an Academic year I shift my practice towards organising a community garden together with the art students. We meet weekly to garden together in the historical garden of the Academy.

Sympoiesis means 'making together', it comes from the book Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway. In the garden we work towards restoring ecology from a non-human-centred perspective based on the books of Donna Haraway, Anna L. Tsing, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Jamaica Kincaid and many more. We focus on diversity in plants, soil, critters, patches, views and techniques. We try to decolonize the garden practice and take up a multicultural and non-binary practice.

Climate change is only going to become more important, and many artists care about how they can help. In order to find an meaningful approach with ecology it is interesting to work from a pratice based on understanding: to really engage with soil, plants, birds, insects...

Working with nature goes both ways, it will restore ecology in the garden and it will inspire new ways of thinking within an artistic practice. This change of perspective is a shift towards a multitude existing together, a thinking with. When we touch nature, nature touches us, and the trees, stones and compost become meaningful, together we make sense.

The historical garden of the Royal Academy is a protected area, with a landscape design from 1905 and to be able to open up this garden to work together is a meaningful and very important change in the whole ecology of the Academy. Now we have a place where we can interact and study with nature.

I am writing a detailed page on the continuation of the project: the changes in the gardens and what comes in to live with us on a separate page: https://elinedc.blogspot.com/p/the-royal-academy-of-antwerp-garden.html

You can also follow the instagram profile: https://www.instagram.com/royalacademyantwerpgarden/

During this year I keep my studio practice and continue to paint, draw, photograph, film, write and all the other things I like to do in a studio but it will be less vocal. The Gesamthof, A Lesbian Garden continues as well and is very much connected to this research, this tiny ecology is in a healthy condition and getting better all the time. The spill over effect of lots of plants in a small place means we can share seedlings and divide and share plants with the garden community to increase the diversity in the Academy gardens.

Both projects, the Gesamthof and the Sympoiesis Garden, are pioneering in art & ecology, they are among the first and we invent new futures as we go along. There is a lot of groundwork to be done and we can do this because of the support and interest from both within and outside the Academy.

The historical garden of the Academy of Fine Arts is located in the cente of the city of Antwerp.

The communication started with anonymous notes left in various places in the Academy to keep expectations open.

The secret garden was a bare patch of ground and we built a natural pond for biodiversity.

We start small, it's not about reaching a deadline, this project is ongoing in its very nature.

We work from a multispecies perspective, this is not about beauty or produce in a human-centred design.

The plants and seeds are mostly leftovers from the Gesamthof and selected for the context in the Academy: a woodland patch or a secret garden.

Premiere Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden

On 30 July 2022 Anne Reijniers and me screened our short film Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden at Morpho in Antwerp. For this event we organized an exhibition by the poet and writer Johanna M Pas, her work brings gender, nature, ecology and being wild together in her poetry. A pop-up stand of LGBTQI+ bookstand Kartonnen Dozen offered feminist literature related to the art nature project Gesamthof, the lesbian garden in the same location.

We would like to thank everyone who helped to make this empowering and caring event, a big thank you to the wonderful public who came the create a very diverse community for the evening and thank you Johanna M Pas, Terre & Sym, Morpho, Extra City and The Sore Spot Singers.

If new screenings are planned, they will be announced on this website. A very warm thank you from both Anne Reijniers and me.

Photo by Miles Fischer, Anne Reijniers and me at the projection on the wall in the cinema by Morpho

Setting up the cinema at Morpho, it turned out the option to add more chairs was a good idea.

The exhibition with poetry by Johanna M Pas in the beautiful old refter of the monastery.

The poem by Johanna M Pas is also translated by her.

Johanna M Pas writes about gender, identity, nature, ecology and feeling home.

Terre organised the pop-up bookstand by Kartonnen Dozen, the oldest lgbtqi+ bookshop in belgium.

Gesamthof / A Lesbian Garden

Premiere short film (15', 2022)

Screening at MORPHO on 30 july at 21:30h, entrance via Extra City, Provinciestraat 112

Anne Reijniers & Eline De Clercq invite you to the premiere of their short film Gesamthof / A lesbian garden, an art - nature project in the monastery garden of Extra City and MORPHO. In this time document of the garden we follow a tour with Eline De Clercq and the MORPHO artists in residence. The garden provides an entry point to talk about diverse topics such as colonialism in botany, the ambiguity of naming, the social expectations of women and the search for a lesbian identity.

Anne Reijniers and Eline De Clercq are both artists and gardeners living in Antwerp. Anne Reijniers is part of the filmmakers collective 'Collectif Faire-Part' and participated in MORPHO's development residency in 2021. Eline De Clercq is a visual artist, painter and rents a studio at MORPHO in Ploegstraat since 2019 when she also started to work in the monastery garden.

The film shows the Gesamthof, a lesbian garden - including trans people - inspired by the books of Donna Haraway, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jamaica Kincaid, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula Leguin and many other thinkers who are working on togetherness in the Plantationocene. The Gesamthof puts thoughts into tangible practice: Haraway's queer kinship, speculative fabulations, situated knowledge and Tsing's explanation of a complex patchy capitalism and the human aspect into the restoration of post-industrial land as well as being part of the ecology. In the garden we see how compost works, what soil can do and how a pine tree is a great pioneer. In the film we document the garden and our place in it along the garden path. The tours that are given in the garden activate the stories that are shared between the human and nonhuman inhabitants.

The temporary nature of the garden, the residents and the project, gives this short film an urgency. We don't know how long we can stay at this location, and climate change is happening now, both makes us feel like we have to keep working at a better understanding of what ecology means in a multilayered compost.

There is an entire page on the garden project, with old photos, new images and where you can read the garden recipe:

https://elinedc.blogspot.com/p/the-gesamthof.html

or follow on instagram for updates @wool_publishing