Rite for Almere, 2008
Museum De Paviljoens, Almere, NL
Oak wooden tree (8 meters) and fire (15 meters)
All over the world rites and celebrations form the backbone of a society and function as cornerstones of history. The rite is an event to remember or look forward to. An occasion to create a moment of reflection, an enlarged presence of the present, the ideal opportunity to commemorate once past and plan the future. It is an event of which if you are part of that particular society, you just have to be there. Sometimes the initial history of the rite is lost but still continued because it is part of everybodies life. Since Almere lacks a history (beyond 30 years) I thought of giving it one by initiating a rite. An oak tree from the first generation of planted trees in Almere (about 35 years old) was cut square, like a big beam splitting up in smaller beams, covered with dry pinewood and lit on the 21st of August 2008 at 21.00. The tree will stay for a few years as semi-permanent sculpture and will be relit every year untill it only exists in stories.
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Taxonomic Trophies
Ongoing collection of branches preserved and presented as endangered or extinct species. It consists of authentic trophies from Birmingham (UK), Death Valley (USA), Grand Canyon (USA), Tajimi (Japan), Rotterdam (NL), Chaumont devant Damvillers (France),Tbilisi (Georgia), Xiamen (China), Ghent (Belgium), Almere (NL), Shanghai (China), Malibu (USA), Riga (Latvia) and other places. All of these trophies were hunted on my journeys around the world and shipped to Rotterdam.
In my work I stop the clock and try to unravel the process and consequence of time. Between the future and the past lays the present; an elusive point but always present. Like the gardener on his way to Ispahaan, the present is on his way to an unavoidable destiny: the past. There is no escape.
In the Genetologic Research I try to capture these timeless dilemmas of life. Where do we come from? Where are we going? Carpe Diem! Genetology (The Science of First Things) is a self invented science, creating an opposition for the existing Eschatology (The Science of Last Things). How will we look back to the past in the future? What will be left over from the present?
My work is situated exactly on the borderline between the past and the future. Sometimes looking forward to the future of yesterday, sometimes looking back to the history of tomorrow. This brings me as close to science as well as art, like 'The origin of Life Remake' of Stanley Miller and Harold Urey in 1953, where they tried to recreate life with the same basic ingredients present 3,5 billion years ago, or the discovery of the 'Interplanetary Super Highway', fluctuating energy lanes, during the recent 'Genesis' mission making it possible to travel much faster through space without additional fuel or external impulse. The cosmological stepmother of the black holes. The sheep on formadehyde solution of Damien Hirst ('Away from the Flock'), the modern archaeology of Mark Dion ('New England Digs'), the peeled of trees of Guiseppe Penone ('Tree Door') or 'I Like America And America Likes Me', the performance of Joseph Beuys of 1974 in which he lived in a cage for five days in the Rene Black Galley in New York together with a wild coyote: one by one works that feel the pulse of time and balance between the temporary and the timeless.
The Genetologic Research functions as an online sketchbook on which I put my own work in the context of other artworks, events in history, scientific discoveries, intellectual discourse and philosophical explorations. Slowly I'm trying to define and understand Genetology. In the future this research might evolve in an exhibition with a matching catalogue. www.maartenvandeneynde.com