Jorieke Rottier
Residency period May 2024
Project:
ISLAND
The material present and the simple act
A marine student stares at the sea, sitting on a bench by the shore. In his hand a paper boat. I live on Walcheren (Zeeland, NL), an island in a delta whose fertile land is protected by dikes. Far from life in the big city, where art events take place daily, as a child I encountered art in public spaces.
During a festival, a fighter jet demonstration ended in a crash on the island of Långholmen. There was one injured person. A paper airplane², its nose drilled into the ground, commemorates the event.
The discovery that there is another island that has a connection to the fragility of man and island, to being on the road, symbolized with a paper fold, is the visual starting point for this working period.
On Långholmen, a bare rock on which people have manually applied mud and sewage sediment to make it fertile, I will be present for two weeks with attention, absorbing the impressions as folds in my paper.
What does it mean to be part of an archipelago, as a place and as a human being, within current climate developments? What materials and processes are specific to this place? What intrinsic and visual qualities do they offer? What is discarded here, what washes up here? This work period takes place as part of the research within my work process that starts in the spring and continues through fall 2024.
The central question herein is "to what extent does man coincide with her environment?"
AIR Slipvillan –Feeling Fibers
During May 2024, I worked as artist in residence at Slipvillan. Slipvillan is an AIR, exhibition venue and studio building run by artists Laetita Deschamps, Rikard Fåhraeus,Ina Rödén and a bunch of members. I am the third artist from ruimteCAESUUR(NL) to engage in an artistic exchange with Slipvillan: Giel Louws and Hans Overvliet preceded me.
Walking on Långholmen, a green island in the heart of Stockholm (SE), I connected with the place. A place to spend free time, to retreat, I thought. I feel watched through the windows of the apartment buildings across the street, by the people gathering on the little beach in the spring sun. This being-watched relates to the island in several ways: from the airing place in the former prison to the open-air theater, which has a similar floorplan. Both have a central spot, albeit with an opposite purpose: one to guard prisoners, one to be seen by the public. Time passes and the structures last.
The island is connected to the next island by two small bridges. Then there is Sweden's largest steel bridge, the Västerbron (western bridge), which seems to ignore Långholmen. From that bridge, you have great views of the city. Under that bridge, a trail of dust and rock breaks through the exuberant green of Långholmen. The green a gift of seeds that fell into the water from trading ships, germinating from the muck with which prisoners had to cover the island. Next to the bridge, a paper plane folded in stainless steel recalls the crash that took place there during an air show.
In my project proposal, I wrote that I wanted to explore the island by foot and work with the materials that wash up on Långholmen. I live and work along the Westerschelde, which leaves all kinds of partly untraceable material on the coast of Walcheren (NL). Working with washed-upmaterial is a given in my artistic process. During walks along the shoreline, I collect impressions and materials. My kids (baby and toddler) remind me of the importance of walking on a daily basis. They teach me to walk even slower and show that by using all senses, we experience ourselves as part of the environment. Already during the second walk on Långholmen it turned out that, there is no real question of ‘washing ashore’ here: the chestnuts I found, blackened by the brackish water, had fallen from a tree 30 meters away. The ropes I eventually used to create an outdoor sculpture most likely came from the shipyard near the find spot.
As Kierkegaard wrote somewhere: 'never lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself to well-being [...] I walk myself into my best thoughts.' Aquote I found in the book ‘The Songlines,’ by Bruce Chatwin about how among nomadic peoples and specifically among Australian Aboriginal people, their lives coincide with the landscape.
At one of Stockholm's many artist-run initiatives, Tegen2, I meet Anthony Frank Grahamsdaughter. As curator, she curated the current exhibit, which highlights hate crimes against Sami and other minority groups. She shares stories of her Native American family. They suffer from Western colonialism and racism until this day. She shows me work by Lena Stenberg, who wrote a book about the disruption of Sami life. When Nordic countries and Russia closed their borders to Sami in 1800and 1900, it was no longer possible to follow the reindeer throughout Lapland. This started a struggle for the right to live according to their traditions.
Before leaving for Sweden, I read "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin WallKimmerer. In it, she demonstrates and inspires through her embodiment of scientific, personal and native wisdom the importance of the relationship between man and land. There is much more to say about this but during the residency all of the above came together for me as one big question on the urgency of my relationship with my home-environment – and the role of the artistic process in this. This relationship, which I experienced as self-evident, is now confirmed as well as deepened and questioned. Something to continue to work on slowly and attentively.
During the Open Studio, I shared some of these experiences. Fellow artists Masoud Shashavari and Jannike Brantås started a wonderful conversation around artistic processes and the way a change of environment affects them. At some point Jannike asked ‘what rituals do you need in order to get to work?’ a question that still lingers.
To get an impression of the Stockholm archipelago, we took a 2.5-hour boat trip to the island of Grinda, in the heart of the archipelago. Every moment I expected to discover an "empty" horizon consisting of sky and water: every moment there was another island there. Mosses, one of the first life forms to take hold on bare rock (and be eaten by reindeer), eventually formed the work "horizon for anarchipelago (2024)" in Slipvillans’ studio. Grasses grow from the moss, their roots searching for a foothold among the rocks, just as the trees here do at large. Unlike at home, where sand and clay of the dikes desperately need tree roots and dune grasses to keep them in place – and our feet dry.
I try to capture these experiences in a map of Långholmen, linking various places on the island with my artistic attitude such as "collecting,""being alone," and "working with what is" from my work process. The map so gives an alternative impression of the island. It will be available at Slipvillan throughout 2024.
AIR Slipvillan served as a contrast experience for me with the "semi-islandlife" on Walcheren, where I live and work. It uncovered givens and made me embrace the unknown, taking in the environment and further releasing the pressure to make work. With a rock as support, it showed me that islands do not stand by themselves.
