How to start a first blog? Maybe by explaining how this artwork came to exist. It is of course never really possible to tell, but I can eloborate on some of the ingredients.
I tend to spent quite some time among trees, to start with. At some point I became increasingly interested in the concept of ‘rootedness’. In Dutch we use a word that has it’s root in the word ‘earth’, so something like ‘earthliness’ This word has become ever more common in daily speech. When you are rooted or ‘earthed'(dutch: geaard), you are in a state of calmness, stability, firmness. I personally experienced often to be in exactely the opposite state. And the rise of the word can probably be explained by the fact that many people do the same.
But ‘rootedness’ as a concept – as I found in many moments of contemplation and conversations – is much broader than only that of naming a personal’state of mind’. We, as human beings are rooted in so many ways: socially, in a network of friend and family. Our condition is largely dependant on the conectedness of our roots and the quality of the social soil or tissue it is rooted at.
Immigration can also be viewed upon from the idea of rootedness. A man, a woman, a family has been uprooted culturally from a land. The ability to grow new roots will be vital to their condition in the new land.
Even money – I was philosophying one day – as it was disconnected from gold stocks became uprooted, weightless. No weight to slow it down, no body to center it.
So, after coming up with this symbol that bears in it so many possible thoughts and conversation, I started to look back at history and how we got here. This is where the Eiffel Tower came in as a perfect symbol for the age of technology. There are more ‘buildings’ that make sense, but us for now keep focus.
Although the concept was developed a while ago, only last fall we really got a team together to get things going. Mildred, Wessel, Job and me headed for Paris to make ‘the movie’ and parallel the University Larenstein/ van Hall by name of Freek and DorienĀ started to help us with the research. We were connected to them by Jeroen from the Mothership Art Productions. Special thanks to everybody here mentioned. This will be an interesting journey…