Annotations for a piece of unaltered nature.
I was looking for a rock to hide my cigarette butt so Mother Nature could take her time to turn it into compost, but there was none around. I stood up and started walking around. No rocks, only sand. Behind a bush I saw a bottle of Grolsch that was asking to be broken. I would have loved to try my luck, but then again, there were no rocks around. I realized it was odd that these enormous trees have grown out of the sandy soil. The arrangement of the trees was odd too. Unfortunately, there was nothing metaphysical going on, and the explanation for all my questions was very clear: I was smoking in a forest in the Netherlands. There are no rocks in the soil because this used to be the seafloor. You can even find some seashells along cigarette butts And the placement of the trees is a design decision: When you have brand new land just reclaimed from the sea you have to carefully plan what are you going to do with it. Otherwise the water will just come back.
After giving up on my quest for finding a rock I thought about the arrogance of the idea of building a whole country by fighting the sea. Way before theorist came up with catchy names to describe grand scale transformations in the environment carried out by humans, the Dutch were already creating their own landscapes. In fact, landscape comes from landschap, a Dutch word which acknowledges a reciprocal shaping between land and people. I come myself from a country with its own history with water: before the arrival of Europeans, the indigenous people, like the Dutch, would settle in places that would flood during the rainy season so, unlike the Dutch, they would move accordingly, coming back to their settlements when the weather allowed it. After the arrival of Europeans, the rivers would still flood but the people would stay with no real infrastructure to tame the water, which in sweeps away houses, crops, cars, refrigerators, televisions, mattresses and whatnot.
I was once following the course of one of these rivers, one of the few that was tamed by building concrete structures on its riverbed. For most of its course the river is just surrounded by buildings, but in the less inhabited parts of the city you find some patches of forest where native plants, birds and other fauna still thrive among the trash brought by the river. As I was quietly looking for a place to place my tripod and camera keeping an eye over my shoulder, I found a blue, cute looking egg laying on the most delicate nest ever: carefully picked pieces of plastic packages from chips, chocolates and lollypop sticks were woven together with the utmost peculiar craft. It was truly an epiphany: in my mind, this nest epitomized a new realism that encompasses social practices that objectivize concepts, almost new aesthetics. Or something like that. I was really scared, all alone with my camera in the woods.
Nevertheless, the plastic nest came to my mind when looking for a rock in the gaudy Bloesempark in Amsterdamse Bos. What would it take to build a plastic three forest? After careful calculations I came up with the numbers:
- 150 plastic Christmas trees.
- 450 euros worth of Floral Foam.
- 1 fog machine 500 watts.
- 1 strobe light.
- 4 liters of pine essential oil extracted from ArbreMagic brand air fresheners.
As the cars and trucks from the Rijksweg A9 scored my visit to the woods, I kept dreaming of my plastic tree forest as a place of unaltered nature, far away from the devious depictions of Yosemite National Park portrayed in Ansel Adam’s pictures, or the epic landscapes of waste and destruction of Edward Burtynsky. An uncompostable but highly flammable forest. Well, in a way it is both.
Published in Robida Mazazine No. 7, 2021.