An archipelago of real and imagined islands. Island (metaphor) inspired ancient, modern & contemporary art, photography, design, literature, film, music,… curated by Belgian photographer Sylvie De Weze. Feel free to make a suggestion!
A new "island garden" has been inaugurated at the Meise Botanical Gardens outside of Brussels in September 2022.
The island garden is formed by a group of islets on the large lake located on the larger grounds.
"It’s a special walk on the water. A group of islands and different levels create a range of aquatic biotopes. You only reach them via a 400-metre meandering walk across the water."
Several species of plants have already been placed, including water cypress (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), swamp cypress (Taxodium distichum) and serpentine pine (Araucaria araucana).
Still to come are new trees, shrubs and aquatic and marsh plants, with more than 400 species in total that will take root next planting season.
Artist-architects Gijs Van Vaerenbergh and Atelier Arne Deruyter were behind much of the unique garden’s design.
“In the heart of Belgian’s Meise Botanic Garden, a small island is situated in the centre of a centuries-old castle pond,” Van Vaerenbergh explained.
“It was the ambition to transform this island into a new and extensive collection of water - and shore plants, in addition to the numerous botanical collections on the site.”
In order to make the site accessible, a 500-metre-long concrete platform was built, using the landscape as a formwork and deep pillars for support.
“Then, by digging away the earth in very precise locations, we introduced water on the island and created a micro-topography for an ‘ensemble’ of different water and shore biotopes like a mangrove, a fern forest, a European swamp, a fen,” explained Van Vaerenbergh.
Gabriel Orozco 🏝️ Island within an island (Isla en La Isla)
“One can see this impulse in the work of Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco. His richly suggestive 1993 photograph "Island Within an Island" depicts a temporary sculpture made by the artist from litter and pieces of board set against the imposing Manhattan skyline. Orozco contrasts impermanence with permanence, texture with form. In constructing his own miniature version of the city, he is humanizing it for his own benefit. One thinks, in this context, of that witty set of photographs (not in this show) by American Duane Michals in which he shows himself in front of the great pyramids at Giza. He then proceeded to build a miniature replica of the site with stones. By doing so, he was personalizing what the history books had impersonally called a "wonder of the world." In both instances, the idea is to take something that inspires fear or awe and re-create it in an effort to understand it better.”
In 'Happy Island' integreert Bram Verstraeten verschillende thema's. Thema's die hij naar eigen zeggen in zijn eerder werk enkel 'onderzocht, bestudeerde of uitdiepte'. Voor het eerst vertelt Bram nu een 'beeldenverhaal'. Hij speelt ook niet langer alléén de peperkoeken (anti-?)held; hij betrekt er meteen - heel waarheidsgetrouw, overigens - z'n hele gezin bij.
Tussen de hoofdrolspelers zit één fictieve figuur: de kwispelende hond. Bram laat deze opdraven als symbool van het eenvoudige Westerse familiegeluk. Om te ontsnappen aan de hectiek van alledag, gaat de familie in haar dromen op avontuur naar het archetype van rust en vrijheid: een onbewoond eiland.
Maar evenzeer is dit verhaal een hulde aan het menselijk vermogen tot 'scheppen'. Voor Bram een van de belangrijkste bestaansredenen van de mens. Want zie: het gezin wendt afval aan om er palmbomen mee te imiteren. En daarin een boomhut te bouwen. Het gezin beleeft plezier aan z'n 'making of the settlement'. De mens als intrinsiek gemotiveerd creërend wezen. Niet alleen op fysiek terrein. Maar ook in het genereren van gedachten en ideeën, die zelfs de voeling met de realiteit mogen verliezen. Want hoewel de figuren in dit beeldverhaal bijna levensecht ogen, Bram houdt ons tegelijk in zijn illusie, in zijn geënsceneerde reis: de golven zijn kussens, de roeispanen bezems en de palmbomen plastic potjes.
Eens hun uitvalsbasis klaar is, slaat de verveling echter opnieuw toe. Hoewel absolute vrijheid nastreven het hoogste goed was, blijken onze 'spelers' er helaas niet meteen vorm aan te kunnen geven. En trappen ze - letterlijk en figuurlijk - in de val. Die waarin de mens de natuur ondergeschikt wil maken aan zichzelf. Er structuren in uittekent en -bouwt. Tot hij/zij zichzelf opnieuw 'begrensd' voelt. En een nieuwe vlucht zich aandient.
Is dat terug naar af? Of is het gras altijd groener aan de overkant? Bram laat het in het midden. Maar stelt steeds vaker vast dat weinig mensen écht vrij kunnen zijn. En ze keer op keer vluchten voor de beperkingen die ze zichzelf opleggen - al lijken deze initieel vaak verrijkingen.
Laat je meevoeren in dit schijnbaar kinderlijke reisverhaaltje met gelaagde bodem. En zie hoe Bram de onderwerpen die hem aanbelangen, en die hij eerder in afzonderlijke reeksen behandelde, nu samenbrengt in acht fraaie sculpturen.
Antoinette Nausikaä (NL, 1973) creates site-specific investigative projects in places where nature and culture coincide. It is the balance between the two that fascinates her. In her installation, Nausikaä plays with the relation between the human abstract and the natural organic, the mundane and the transcendent. She is fascinated by the balance between nature and culture and the thought that nature can be seen as an integral part of our everyday life and ourselves.
A phantom island is an island whose existence is mentioned in atlases for a certain length of time and is then withdrawn when it is proved that it does not exist. There are many causes to explain these geographic fictions: geopolitical and economic interests, copyrights, mirages, optical illusions, human error, memes, hoaxes, legends, etc.
Having researched the subject, Stéphanie Roland reconstituted the outlines of phantom islands, which she then executed in marble, bestowing materiality and permanence on these ephemeral entities from the Western world.
Beside this, a film shows us Podesta Island, one of the last contemporary phantom islands, which is still shown on Google Earth today. Just an annotated point, with no physical territory. For a century now, numerous sources have emitted contradictory opinions as to its existence and, despite their advanced technology, geographical institutions do not have a uniform answer to this very simple-sounding question. This hybrid film, between documentary and fiction, explores the narratives relating to this island and compares the different sources in an attempt to recapture a complex, fragmented reality. How do we approach reality in a post-truth age? Are there any unknown zones left in a world that seems hyper-connected and exhaustively mapped?
The performances, video pieces, photographs and objects of Finnish artist Antti Laitinen (born 1975) choreograph, in humoristic and experimental ways, the desperate quest for identity in remote places. Time and again he arranges absurd situations, subjecting himself to intense physical and mental challenges that are blatantly at odds with their practical use and that make him appear like a modern-day Sisyphus. In his video titled Voyage (2008) Antti Laitinen doggedly and aimlessly paddles across the open sea on a self-built “Paradise Island.” The mobile island represents a place of freedom outside of society, while the surrounding waters always hold the possibility of unexpected encounters. At the same time, the floating island makes him a prisoner in his own Utopia. In Voyage, as in many of Laitinen’s curious escapades, the quest for identity appears to lead to a tragicomical and absurd experience of reality. Antti Laitinen is among the internationally most prominent contemporary Finnish artists and has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. The performances accompanying the video Voyage, which is shown at the Museum Kunst der Westküste, was originally staged at the Hotel Meridian exhibition in London in 2008, as well as at the Athens Biennial and the Mänttä Art Festival in Finland in 2009.
I went to trace the contours of an island
and instead I discovered the boundaries of the ocean.
~Ludwig Wittgenstein
Naples, 18 June 2019
Today on board a ship I leave my coast to reach an island.
I will cross the sea every day of my itinerary, in my jacket pocket I have an aquamarine stone and a notebook with a light blue cover where I will write down thoughts and perception, I will keep my aquatic story soaked in blue molecules suspended between sky and sea, of uncertain coordinates and changing constellations. I will listen to the sound of the ocean, I will become a fragment in the grammar of the coast and I will be dazzled by the light of a summer solstice capable of eclipsing the shadow of some scar.
There, where the land is lost in the sea, I will be an island within an island.
I built this work in the time of an artistic residence on the island of Asinara, in Sardinia.
My job was to draw a visual map of the island.
Only at the end of my journey, observing the photographs I collected and the notes written in the notebook, did I understand that I was the island I was contemplating.
The Island K and the theory of the South 🏝 group exhibition
An artistic fiction. An isolated island with a natural exotic kingdom and indigenous culture. The theory of this southern island, its utopian existence, is the inspiration for the creation and interpretation of art works in Keratokampos. The challenge of a modern “plague" in the limits of human isolation tests the spiritual proximity of artists in response to the loneliness of the times.
In many ways, this art project is an isolated experiment: a group of artists come to Keratokampos, in the heat of the summer, in a small art gallery in the South of the Southest territory of a continent, Crete (Greece), to create and express themselves in a time of uncertainty for the world’s future.
Viannos Art Gallery "Savas Petrakis" is offering time and space to the artists to experiment and project their work in a micro-environment in a time where we are questioning the globalization of art and where we come to consider ourselves lucky to be spending our isolation in a provincial territory. Now those who are in luck find themselves in scarcely populated areas and not the big urban centers of the art world. And in this relative isolation they are producing new works and they are exchanging ideas with other artists, constructing locally new places and projects. One would say, is it so important for the artists to survive? Only the art will survive anyway. The last people to die in the Siberian Gulag - because everyone died in the end were the artists. And all that is left of them are the few works in memory of a humanity that has been wiped out. Because the ideas created the impetus that kept them, a little more, in life; a little more, that is, as long as it takes to imprint an idea.
And this isolation, this feeling of being apart from the society, is the ephemeral place where art is made. We were forced these last months to live cutout from our social life. We were forced to “distance”. But for artists, this isolation is a metaphor of their overall life on the edge of our society through all times. In Keratokampos this summer we are imagining a fiction: a group of humans have grown apart from the rest of the world in this Southern territory. In this small insular society, all of the population is indigenous and creative. They live in a place of mythical creatures that developed locally and they exchange ideas and develop art without a consideration of what is happening outside their time and space. It could be that the rest of the world does not exist, whether it was because of a pandemic, we do not know.
What we do know is that these indigenous people are also a metaphor: a recognition of the distance between our society and the people that do not fit in it. This is the awareness that ideas have a tendency to survive and that creativity is possible, even at the furthest corner of Europe, far from the art capitals of our world.
Now, how does the proximity between the artists, in this relative isolation can be beneficial to anyone? The answer comes probably from the times of The Plague of Athens, when 25% of the city’s population died, but tragedies such as Oedipus Rex by Sophocles or Hippolytus by Euripides managed to be written. And we say managed, because as Ms. Chaireti is pointing out, art has a capacity of surviving. Many of the famous tragedies we know today, were written to be played one single afternoon in Athens. And many famous artworks or scores were composed because of a conversation between friends, because of the loss of a loved one, or because an indigestion kept someone awake two hundred years ago. In many ways, this pandemic has changed time and connections. Suddenly we have time to be still.
In our exhibition you will find a group of artists and friends, in conversation between them, imagining a new world and a new nature. In the photographic work of Mary Chairetaki, Panos Charalampidis, and Stelios Papardelas we see an alternative vision of a world in the common places that we live in, from the Lassithi Plateau of Crete to the United States.
Maro Michalakakos, Vincent Meyrignac, and Vincent Parisot, imagine a different nature, where its animal kingdom and objects are shaping a sensory game of imagination, partially inspired by myths, allegories and “la pensée du Midi – the theory of the South” of Albert Camus. A new installation of the collection of the Art Gallery is joining this dialogue.
Katerina Samara, Melanie Levick-Parkin and other artists create murals locally inspired by the location and their research on the culture of this land.
Stella Chaireti and Panos Ioannidis, in close collaboration, unite us through poetry readings, discussions and interpretations of the Plague of Athens. Eleftheria Komi, improvises a new video work from her time in Keratokampos this summer.
This 45 minute film depicts the small island of Inujima which is located in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea. Inujima is in many ways exemplary of Japan’s last 400 years of industrialization. Once an island of fishermen and farmers, Inujima then became a place of granite quarries and copper refineries. Now all the works stand empty; the quarries filled with water, factory chimneys crumbling. The island’s aged population has dwindled to around fifty people who continue their day-to-day lives in this evocative and rather neglected place where clipped trees and well tended allotments stand next to abandoned homes.
Fiona Tan filmed Inujima in May 2010 just as the first phase of a project commissioned by the Naoshima Fukutake Art Museum was being completed. The architect Kazuyo Sejima has been engaged by the museum to create ten pavilions for the exhibition of artworks on the island. So this a moment of transition for Inujima and from time to time one glimpses the building works or one of the startling new structures whose shiny contemporaneity seems somehow at odds with its surroundings. But in Tan’s film this sense of change is felt almost more than it is seen. Cloud Island is a slow, quiet work. A film which is in many ways about waiting.
The story is about the illegal dumping scandal of industrial waste on a rural island located in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan, called Teshima.
A huge volume of industrial waste, mainly automotive shredder residues, had been illegally dumped between 1975 and 1980s in Teshima. The beautiful beach was filled with garbage from unauthorized dumping, which was buried in the sand or piled up in heaps and burnt, causing black smoke to rise here and there. After a long legal battle, the issue was finally settled and the cleaning of the island started in 2000, and since then about 918,000 tons of industrial waste had been transferred to nearby Naoshima Island for intermediate processing. The transport was completed in March 2017, followed by the completion of intermediate processing in June 2017.
Based on this background, this project consists of two elements. One is landscape of the island I have taken after July 2017 to 2018. The other is archival photographs the island residents have taken in 1980-2000s. The archival photographs are transparent into the current landscape.
I am a generation who does not know the incident directly. Teshima is now well known for “Island of Arts” as long as Naoshima. More and more tourists are coming from all over the world and Japan to enjoy a number of the art sites, food, and nature in the island. The Teshima incident is fading with time. Therefore, I am trying to indicate what has happened along with the economic growth, in this beautiful island of Japan.
I've been a Tokyo-based photographer who travels around rural areas in Japan, looking for the long-lasting beauty in the ordinary landscapes there. Through this journey, I've came to think that the most beuatiful scenery is the landscape with natrue touched by human, not untouched nature. After the 19th centry"s economic growth, however, some of such beautiful nature has been too-much touched by human. Teshima Island in Setouchi (the Seto Inland Sea) is one of its characteristic cases.
The work of Fiona Tan, with its characteristic visual richness and singular temporalities, examines complex issues such as the relationship between personal and collective history, the role of memory and the existence of the past in the present.
Filmed on the Swedish island of Gotland, "Island" (2008) explores the relationship between the moving image and memory, which are capable of transporting us to different places and times. A voice-over relates the story of a woman who came to the island to be alone, for a period of temporary retreat. The narrator discloses the intimate thoughts of this absent figure, her distant memories, her desire for exile, her often ambiguous relationship with the world and with time.
Island emerged from Tan’s annual excursions to Gotland, an island off the east coast of Sweden, the location of the renowned Russian film maker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s last film The Sacrifice. Filmed in black and white, Island is comprised of shots that traverse a stark landscape of trees, horizon and clouds. The slow camera work, coupled with the lack of human presence, creates a sense of unease in the viewer and evokes the feeling that time has been suspended. Voice-over narration recounts a woman’s experience and memories of an unnamed island, and allows the viewer to extrapolate meaning from the austere images presented. With Tarkovsky’s apocalyptic last film as a point of departure, Island represents for Tan an imaginary retreat in search of an appropriate individual response to threat, disruption and danger.
The work of photographer Alice Pallot (Paris-Bruxelles) questions the connections between landscapes and a constantly changing natural environment, as well as the ambiguous relationship we have with our environment. In 2018, she collaborated with scientists and residents on two active volcanoes, Vulcano and Stromboli. For some of them, volcanic eruptions are divine manifestations. The collaboration resulted in the photo series L'ÎLE HIMERO.
A colourful and phantasmagoric aesthetic draws the viewer into a parallel universe inspired by reality: plants that have evolved differently thanks to the fertile soil of volcanoes, a mouth that spews sulfur crystals at very high temperatures, mollusks resting on the black and sparkling sand the Vulcano. For hundreds of years, humans and scientists have tried to understand how and why the elements of a volcano change when it erupts. Despite scientific progress, some volcanic eruptions remain unpredictable.
“I made this series after meeting a volcanologist who was born Stromboli and had an unconditional connection to the volcano. In these images I combine anecdotes and scientific facts to give the viewer a new perspective on volcanoes. In a supernatural journey, I repeat the experience I experienced, gradually bringing the viewer to the perimeter of the volcano of L'lle Himero, blurring the lines between fiction and reality, ”says Pallot.
At a time when natural resources are running out, we have everything to learn from a plant world on which human survival and future depend. Between exploitation and protection, appropriation and adaptation, Pallot looks for new perspectives. It is through photographs that you could almost describe as mystical that they raise questions intrinsically linked to our time. As her research, expeditions and experiments progress, Pallot's photographs become witnesses to a new and future era.
This BIP Liège exhibition ran until 15.11.2020, but is now closed due to corona.
“The technology driven work of art that will be analyzed critically in this paper is Rodney Graham’s Vexation Island. Vexation Island is a short 9-minute film that was created by Graham in 1997. The film is projected via DVD on a loop and presents an unconscious or sleeping eighteenth century shipwrecked man with a wound on his head. This man gets up, notices a coconut in a nearby palm tree, and shakes it to get it down. The coconut falls out of the tree and hits him on the head where his wound already is/was. He, then, is knocked unconscious and falls down in the same place from which he had started. Then, the film seamlessly starts all over again, raising questions whether or not the short film has a beginning or an end. Temporality plays a key role in this contemporary work. The ever-looming presence of time in Vexation Island is made apparent through Graham’s use of the abject and video looping, the contrast between past and present, and the apparent influence of psychoanalysis.”
