The Animate Landscape
Ingenlunde Hellig
Sorry for Calling you an Inanimate Object
The Significant Other
Det Bevidste Landskab
Morphologies
Window of Otherworldly Delights
CV
Info
Structure in oak, reliefs in plastic, drawingframed in sculpted mahogany, 3D animation video.
2022.
Duration 7 min. loop.
Exhibition context: Solo exhibition at Babel, Trondheim, Norway.
In the grove, among Quercus and Swietenia, scenes are playing-out, starring a wild and wilful nature. Aegopodium podagraria, Fagus sylvatica, Rubus plicatus and Circaea lutetiana, plants that surround us on a day to day basis, that we often take for granted as passive, almost lifeless objects, are dancing and gesturing, and acting differently, from what we are used to, not inanimate and inert, but in free and expressive movement.
The extermination of the sacred groves, which was committed by Christian missionaries from around the 2nd and 3rd centuries until the 13th century, brought with it a new view of nature. The old nature religions were razed to the ground in favour of Christianity and a view of nature which reaches into how nature is being approached, particularly in the West today.
The approach went from a worship of nature as the creator of everything, and something one had to live in respectful harmony with, to a new dogmatic view of a nature that was not creative in itself, but a creation created by the one true God and given as a gift to man, as an enormous resource, for free use and exploitation.
The worship of nature was considered blasphemy, an expression of idolatry. The wilderness of the summit of the green-clad hill had to be tamed, and its hidden idols driven away. The trees were felled and with them the fauna followed. The magic was gone.
Photos by Susann Jamtøy / Babel
Produced with support by
Danish Arts Foundation
Arts and Culture Norway
Norwegian Visual Artists Fund