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David Claerbout & Stefan Hertmans
Hannibal Books
Accompanies exhibition “At the window” at Gaasbeek Castle until November 16.
Flanders, one of the most densely populated areas of Europe, is the birthplace of artist David Claerbout, whose reaction to an excess of human frenzy is a quest to redefine time.
He recruits fellow Belgian Stefan Hertmans for poetry that digs deep into our collective guilty conscience to accompany installations that explore humankind’s destructive relationship with the environment.
With an accompanying book, the results that soothe and unsettle in equal measure are on show until November at Gaasbeck Castle, just outside Brussels, which itself has a deceptive relationship with time: it dates from the 13th-century, but was destroyed and rebuilt, meaning it is only pseudo-medieval.
The trees in the extensive forest that surrounds it are at once symbols of timelessness and of transience as Claerbout makes us focus on their vulnerabilty.
The first of his three video works “The Woodcarver and the Forest” takes its inspiration from the revival of interest in woodworking, which apparently has become popular in our digital age as a way for people, especially young adults, to find focus and improve their motor skills.
In part, the calming effect derives from ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, effects to which Claerbout is extremely sensitive. Creating his film was, therefore, a paradoxical experience, we are told, that made him feel deeply relaxed even as the intellectual awareness that gently crafting spoons from a wooden trunk means killing a tree made him anxious.
Hertmans’ poem “Dionysus Dendrites” also lulls us with mellifluous words, but if we commit to the slow reading they demand, they trouble us with a sense that we have for centuries got everything the wrong way round: the natural overgrowth harbours understanding beyond our reach; the inward growth of trees is expansive and healthy, while we are rotten to the core.
Claerbout’s next meditation “Birdcage” draws on another Belgian artist René Magritte and the eerie luminosity of “The Empire of Light”.
While Magritte’s paintings convey a sense of menace, “Birdcage” unleashes the latent horror, juxtaposing the serenity of nature with a traumatic explosion.
Finally, “Backwards Growing Tree” is a digital rendering of a solitary tree, observed over a period of five years, in the countryside near Salsomaggiore Terme in the Italian province of Parma.
Claerbout tells us in the accompanying catalogue that his exploration of time and his bending it and stretching it is a reaction to the era in which he lives.
Most people are stressed by the idea they do not have enough time, which is, Claerbout says, “a big unstoppable coin rolling towards a future that is always ahead, while the past is always behind”.
He places the disease, as modern society perceives it, of growing old in apposition to the “silky, soft reality” of software and virtual technologies that are “pure, young and innocent” provided you overlook the fact today’s data-centres would be “as hot as hell” without cooling.
The antidote is the non-linear time of birdsong and trees.
Birdsong
David Claerbout & Stefan Hertmans
Hannibal Books
Accompanies exhibition “At the window” at Gaasbeek Castle until November 16.
Flanders, one of the most densely populated areas of Europe, is the birthplace of artist David Claerbout, whose reaction to an excess of human frenzy is a quest to redefine time.
He recruits fellow Belgian Stefan Hertmans for poetry that digs deep into our collective guilty conscience to accompany installations that explore humankind’s destructive relationship with the environment.
With an accompanying book, the results that soothe and unsettle in equal measure are on show until November at Gaasbeck Castle, just outside Brussels, which itself has a deceptive relationship with time: it dates from the 13th-century, but was destroyed and rebuilt, meaning it is only pseudo-medieval.
The trees in the extensive forest that surrounds it are at once symbols of timelessness and of transience as Claerbout makes us focus on their vulnerabilty.
The first of his three video works “The Woodcarver and the Forest” takes its inspiration from the revival of interest in woodworking, which apparently has become popular in our digital age as a way for people, especially young adults, to find focus and improve their motor skills.
In part, the calming effect derives from ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, effects to which Claerbout is extremely sensitive. Creating his film was, therefore, a paradoxical experience, we are told, that made him feel deeply relaxed even as the intellectual awareness that gently crafting spoons from a wooden trunk means killing a tree made him anxious.
Hertmans’ poem “Dionysus Dendrites” also lulls us with mellifluous words, but if we commit to the slow reading they demand, they trouble us with a sense that we have for centuries got everything the wrong way round: the natural overgrowth harbours understanding beyond our reach; the inward growth of trees is expansive and healthy, while we are rotten to the core.
Claerbout’s next meditation “Birdcage” draws on another Belgian artist René Magritte and the eerie luminosity of “The Empire of Light”.
While Magritte’s paintings convey a sense of menace, “Birdcage” unleashes the latent horror, juxtaposing the serenity of nature with a traumatic explosion.
Finally, “Backwards Growing Tree” is a digital rendering of a solitary tree, observed over a period of five years, in the countryside near Salsomaggiore Terme in the Italian province of Parma.
Claerbout tells us in the accompanying catalogue that his exploration of time and his bending it and stretching it is a reaction to the era in which he lives.
Most people are stressed by the idea they do not have enough time, which is, Claerbout says, “a big unstoppable coin rolling towards a future that is always ahead, while the past is always behind”.
He places the disease, as modern society perceives it, of growing old in apposition to the “silky, soft reality” of software and virtual technologies that are “pure, young and innocent” provided you overlook the fact today’s data-centres would be “as hot as hell” without cooling.
The antidote is the non-linear time of birdsong and trees.
Barbara Lewis © 2025.
By Barbara Lewis • art, books, film, poetry, year 2025 • Tags: art, Barbara Lewis, books, film, poetry