When government decree nr. 287/2022 (VIII. 4.) concerning specific rules to meet firewood demand was enacted in Hungary, the sixth iteration of the art triennial Lille3000 on the theme of Utopia has already been ongoing in Lille, France. Undoubtedly, the two events are far from being equisignificant. For example, given the worsening state of the environment both across Europe and globally, the effects of decrees and acts such as the one above will be much more pronounced in Lille (among others) than those of Utopia will be in Hungary; and the same applies to the ongoing energy crisis as well. The other way round would be clearly preferable: the aims of the utopia conjured up at Lille3000 are in sharp contrast to the desperate details of our reality.
It is impossible to summarize the complexity and the experience of the plethora of exhibitions, interactive events, installations, and so called ‘Cap trails’ (art and festive walks in and around Lille) organized between May 14 and October 2, 2022, and doing so would be going against the aims of the curators and artists at Utopia. Most of the events at the triennial specifically engage multiple senses: besides vision, they often also build on olfactory, auditory, and tactile perception. Utopia, therefore, ought to be experienced in person, and given the overwhelming amount of things to see and feel, each visitor will have their very own, private experience of Utopia. In an act of unabashed, non-exhaustive arbitrariness, I will focus on three specific sights here to present my own experience of Utopia, one among the myriads possible.
Moss People by Kim Simmonson
For those arriving by train to Gare de Lille-Flandres, one of the first works to encounter are Moss People by Finnish sculptor and ceramic artist Kim Simonsson. Green sculptures of children, covered in a soft, moss-like coating, flank both sides of rue Faidherbe, the road between the train station and Grand'Place. The sculptures, which are around 3 meters tall on 2-meter high bases, tower above pedestrians, yet they do so without being threatening. As if they were children of a different civilization (and of a different ethos): the Traveller, the Gatherer, the Philosopher and eight others appear as curious, innocent, and harmless explorers from another people: they mind their own business over our heads, while les lillois are busy minding theirs. They communicate with one another (and with the natives, that is, us) using the international sign language, except for the Philosopher. She does not sign: her task is not to communicate but to perceive. She allows reality to flow through her indiscriminately; then she questions about it, arranges it into a framework of ideas, and passes it on. Aptly, her attribute is a sphere tied on her back “that reflects and distorts the world around her”.[1]
The process that lends the Moss People their green color was discovered by Simonsson in 2012 through a happy accident while experimenting with the flocking technique. The shapes and figures in his work are inspired by the manga by Takashi Murakami. Simonsson sees his sculptures “as characters in a parallel universe. […] They convey things that have lost their importance for us. For them, these things have an intimate meaning, coming not from their function, but rather from the memory that they conjure up.”[2]
The Philosopher of the Moss People reflects an ugly image of many an aspect of humanity’s colonial past and present. We have been trampling our reality with feet much smaller than their gigantic shoes but with much more ignorant arrogance. Standing among Simonsson’s Moss People, the question and maybe a longing arises: what would we be capable of if we borrowed some of the gentle demeanor and mindset of these child-giants?
La Forêt Magique (The Magic Forest)
If we leave the train station and the Moss People behind, and head southwest, a 12-minute walk takes us to the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Lille’s museum of fine art, where between May 13 and September 19 the permanent collection is amended by the exhibition entitled La Foret Magique (The Magic Forest). The curators aim to interpret art history from an environmental point of view,[3] focusing on humanity’s relationship with trees and, by extension, with the forest. It is important to note that the exhibition includes “only” 50 works, all sourced from within Europe. This curatorial decision significantly reduces the carbon footprint of the exhibition, which is an explicit part of the experience and continues a tradition of environmentally conscious shows, initiated by the 2021 exhibition Experience Goya at the Palais des Beaux-Arts.
The first stage of the exhibition is the immersive spiral space in the atrium. Its external walls are covered with a lot of reading material, including the definitions of forests and primary forests. The inside of the space is occupied by the video installation Pleasant Places by David Quayola that surrounds visitors with four large screens and the susurrus of tree canopies. On the screens, monochrome groves are melting into sun-tanned yellows and greens, followed by sweltering meadows loud with crickets and spotted with red poppies. At the areas in the images where the plants’ stems are longer, the canopies are denser, and the wind catches them more easily and moves them more, the monochrome landscape slowly colors up. Sometimes it does so pixel by pixel; other times, the plants act as if they were the brushes of an Impressionist painter, tracing the blurry road of their windswept movements with broad strokes. In such a swirling of colors, the allusion to van Gogh is unmistakable. Quayola’s work is a sophisticated digital confession, saying that the wind can only take on meaning and a body among the plants it blows; that it needs lost of extensive canopies to paint the monochrome stillness into the colorful swirls of life.
Following Quayola’s poetic introduction, the exhibition continues on sublevel 2. The age-old staircases are replaced by cold, Brutalist concrete. Further forest experiences are waiting under a dizzyingly high ceiling, behind the robust glass doors. There are neither windows nor any natural light: concrete encapsulates the entire space. The austerity of the built environment is in stark contrast to the exhibition’s theme – and it works. It feels as if we were reminiscing about the multifaceted relationship between humans and forests in the A/C-frozen concrete bunker of a post-apocalyptic SF.
The rooms on this sublevel are themed “The Sacred Tree”, “The Haunted Forest” and “The Enchanted Forest,” respectively. They cover a period from the Middle Ages to the present, and include works by Theodore Rousseau, Jan Brueghel de Velours, Pieter Brueghel the Younger, James Cameron (yes, the Avatar guy), Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and Gustave Doré, among others, which explore our relationship with the forest in our pagan, mythological, Biblical, romantic etc. past and present.
The experience can be aptly described through three selected works: another one by David Quayola, Albion by Mat Collishaw, and a digital installation by Jakob Kudsk Steensen. Quayola’s print Remains: Vallée de Joux (2017) continues the exploration into our visual ideas of the forest through late 19th- and early 20th-century painting movements, counterpointing the sensitivity of the human eye with the objective gaze of a machine. Quayola created a 3D scan of the trees in Vallée de Joux, and the scanned image displays significantly more visual data than what a human being viewing a tree can normally process, resulting in a representation of a tree unlike anything we may be used to. Against a black backdrop, we see quasi-pointillistic tree-ghosts made up of white dots, their outlines blurred: as if something only became a tree when the white dots attained a certain density in a shape we can recognize as that of a tree. The scanner collects data thoroughly yet its gaze is empty; its work is complemented by an anthropogenic gesture of selection, of assemblage, in this case by David Quayola. As Valentina Peri writes, “[i]t is precisely from this idea of assemblage that we must think, understand and represent the world: as an original and hybrid composition of nature, culture, subjects and objects, human and non-human.”[4]
British artist Mat Collishaw’s Albion (2017) is yet another tree-ghost. The thousand-year-old Major Oak of Sherwood Forest, which according to legend provided shelter for Robin Hood and his Merry Men, is today held up by metallic supports. While for Collishaw, the oak tree clearly represents “the fragile Albion, which he believes will be a shadow of its former self following Brexit”,[5] the mirrored image of the giant tree is also pregnant with a deeper symbolism. The image of the tree is spread in front of our feet, and it is mirrored up from there into the standing position one expects from a living tree. In its whiteness, there is no distinction between its artificial supports and the living branches. The human desire to preserve and the body of the ancient tree are one: the tree and our relationship to it are fully entwined. As an oak-shell with empty outlines, we can watch the slow rotation of a nostalgic attachment, not only to a tree but to a tangible piece of legends that shaped communities.
Catharsis by Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen features a digital forest[6] seen through six frames, and it flies us through a forest simulation from the cool streams running among the roots all the way to the canopies that spread beyond the horizon. Almost no human in the 21st century has seen contiguous forests this large from bird’s-eye view – or from any view at all. We look out on the panoramic view through the frames as if through windows. Our gaze follows the video’s dynamics toward infinity, yet regardless of their size, the frames add a layer of alienating fragmentation to the experience. The vista was created using images from various North American forests, but in spite of the lush green vegetation and its apparent teeming with life, there is still a palpable sense of artifice to it, even beyond the alienating effect of the frames – something painfully fake. This sensation is an organic part of the installation. The untouchable faux forest is not the projected image of a forest: it is itself the forest. That is all: a two-dimensional illusion tricked up into 3D. We cannot find it, walk in it, or feel it. We can admire it in an air-conditioned concrete room, but it can never offer more than that. And this digital faux forest is in no way more distant from us than those primary forests 80% of which is already gone for good, and the remaining ones are disappearing right now, becoming eternally untouchable. Will we be left only with these false windows overlooking digital billboards? So that we could show the post-logging generations not so much the art history of our relationship with the forest but the forest itself. Just so that they can see it for once.
Stay tuned for pt. 2 of the review essay coming up nex month.
[1] Fourneaux, Marie-Émilie. “Kim Simonsson «Moss People» Les êtres imaginaires nés dans les forêts nordiques – Imaginary beings born in the northern forest.” Utopia – Lille3000, Éditions Beaux Arts, 2022, p. 9.
[2] Simonsson, Kim, qtd. in Fourneaux, p. 9.
[3] Girveau, Bruno, qtd. in Chaizemartin, Julie. “«La Forêt Magique» Décliner la nature depuis l’Antiquité – Ways of picturing nature from Antiquity onwards.” Utopia – Lille3000, Éditions Beaux Arts, 2022, p. 45.
[4] Peri, Valentina. “Quayola Remains.” galerie charlot, 2018. Available at http://www.galeriecharlot.com/en/expo/149/Quayola-Remains.
[5] La Forêt Magique, wall text, La Forêt Magique, Palais de Beaux Arts Lille, 9 August 2022.
[6] A version of the video installation is available on the artist's website at http://www.jakobsteensen.com/catharsis; however, on a small screen, and in a view that is curated differently from what one can see at the exhibition La Forêt Magique, it will be a somewhat different experience.
Details of visual works and images included in the text:
Kim Simonsson. Moss People, 2022. Installation on rue Faidherbe (Lille, France). © Jefunne Gimpel
Kim Simonsson. Moss People, 2022. Installation on rue Faidherbe (Lille, France). © Jefunne Gimpel
David Quayola. Detail of the video installation Pleasant Places at the exhibition La forêt magique. © Maxime Dufour
Exhibition view, La forêt magique. © Maxime Dufour
David Quayola. Remains: Vallée de Joux, exhibition view, La forêt magique. © Maxime Dufour
Mat Colishaw. Albion, exhibition view, La forêt magique. © Maxime Dufour
Jakob Kudsk Steensen. Catharsis, exhibition view, La forêt magique. © Ádám T. Bogár
