In 2005 I experienced being in a rainforest for the first time, in the Western Ghat mountains of Wayanad, Kerala, India. The forests used to stretch across this mountain range along the coast, catching the moisture drifting in from the ocean, becoming rain when it hits these mountains. The Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary is located there and it is one of the most remarkable places on earth. Local inhabitants saw decades ago that the plant-life around them was changing. Orchids growing op the trees along with other epiphytes were diminishing. With a small group they started rescuing plants, without any formal training in botany and they never stopped. Through their amazing perseverance the Sanctuary now provides refuge to thousands of endangered flora. From mosses, to ferns, orchids and trees. And with the plants have come the animals.

The diversity of beings, signals, smells, sounds, colors is overwhelming. The first three days I only covered the trail to the kitchen building! There was just so much life going on.

Then one morning Suprabha Seshan who is a spokesperson within the team led us into the forest. She said: remember, you are seeing the forest, but the forest is also seeing you, with a thousand different eyes, ears and noses. That walk changed my life. I’ve been visiting them regularly over the years. Once I was out making photos in places where in the 1980’s some of the first photos had been taken of the Sanctuary, with Sajji a local Paniya honey collector. (Paniya are a local indigenous group).

I was interested to put those images side-by-side and show them to the Sanctuary-team, to see how much it has changed. Sajji was climbing trees, pointing out medicinal or poisonous plants, identifying hornbills, butterflies, giant woodlice, giant snails, slender green snakes and deer.

What he observes taking people into the forest, is that people who grow up in cities often ‘don’t know how to walk’. I assumed he meant my clumsy way of traversing the slippery rocks in the river. But he meant something different; ‘they walk like nothing is around them.’ The tragedy of this really hit me. I felt it within myself. But a least walking with Sajji and others in the forest has given me an idea of that blind spot, and therefore I can try and grow.

I am greatly indebted to friends like Suprabha, Sajji and others whose senses and social reality are still deeply entwined with the great family of life.

Sanctuary-Lali-Jospeph: Head gardeners Lali Joseph showing an epiphytic fern

Sanctuary 2019: The Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary around 2019. Picture taken by Sajji from the top of a tree.

The Netherlands as a nation actually embodies more sea than land. Water may loom large in the Dutch psyche, but we’ve retreated behind dikes with a sense of security that seems to make us less engaged with the North Sea than we might have been before. That makes the North Sea a pretty good viewpoint from which to address political representation of other-than-human life. The ocean has always been a great agent to undermine our sense of normality, ask anyone whose been sea-sick.

The Embassy of the North Sea was established around the idea that the North Sea might be an excellent view-point from which to explore the emerging rights-for-nature movement. It set out a ten-year agenda in three parts:

• a period of listening,
• a period of communication
• a period of representation.

The main focus of the Embassy is to explore practices; what do rights-for-nature mean in practice, when it is applied to specific areas, species, or communities?

The Future of the Delta team is one of the field-research groups. Other teams have focused on the Eel (starting from the viewpoint of a species), another team has focused on underwater acoustics of the North Sea (exploring from the viewpoint of the sea as a semiosphere), our team is looking at a specific region; Zeeland. The Delta area of Zeeland conststs of a group of islands in the south of the country. This is where I am from and where most of my family lives. Zeeland is probably one of the most volatile human inhabited regions on our planet. The last mayor flood, known simply as De Ramp (the Disaster) happened in living memory, in 1953, when many dikes collapsed under a combination of high-tide and storm. Many people died, even more cattle and horses died. Agricultural lands became saline for many years. Closing the holes in those dikes required an engineering effort of a magnitude never seen before in our country. It resulted in the Delta plan, a gigantean program of coastal engineering.

But the designers of the Delta plan never imagined anything like climate change. Nobody ever imagined that the level of the sea might actually rise. The Delta plan was the culmination of a 1000 years of experience of pushing back the sea with dikes. But there is a limit beyond which dikes no longer work. If the sea level gets too high, the water just presses underneath it. Half our country is below sea-level. So, this is challenging our society fundamentally and it is no longer just an engineering challenge.

This is where our team comes in. The Dutch are so stuck in engineering frames of reference and short-term economic interests that our ability to imagine futures is impaired. That is why the Future of the Delta team of the Embassy of the North Sea is exploring radically different perspectives. This team consisting of sociologist Darko Lagunas, geophysicist Maarten Kleinhans, and myself as an artist, has tried to uncover unseen realities that exist in the region as a way to widen the frame within which futures may be imagined.

We start with the past. The Delta region wasn’t just hit with the 1953 flood which we all remember. It has seen countless floods. This is not something that corresponds well with our self-image as gifted coastal engineers, but with 173 drowned villages Zeeland must be world champions of coastal disaster. You’d be surprised how little this is history is recognized in the region. Borssele, the village I grew up in, was rebuilt on top of one of three local villages that were wiped away in the floods of 1530 and 1532. Surely something in this neglected history can inform our future?

The history of the Dutch East India Company also casts its shadow over the area. The ports of Vlissingen and Middelburg were important nodes in colonial ‘trade routes’ as they are known euphemistically. As the worlds’ first multinational the Dutch East India Company instigated much of the extractive momentum that continues to destroy large parts of our planet and its life. What may be less well recognized, also by the Dutch themselves, is how influential the plantation model was to the forming of our own country. Plantations were early models of capitalistic extraction that we’re not only applied to colonial lands. The investors at the helm of the Company invested in plantations of spices abroad, but also financed the construction of the polders in our own country, by building dikes to be able to grow produce on the rich clay soils. The islands of Zeeland as they are now where formed by the same extractive logic as our colonial territories. Our colonial past and present have created deep wounds in lives and lands abroad, but have also crippled our own lands. Just how much this has impaired the ability of this landscape to adapt to new futures, is a part of the picture we have barely begun to recognize.

Delta-region-Ria-Geluk: Eye-witness Ria Geluk points out where she and her parents sat on the roof during the flood of 1953.

Delta-porpoise-Darko-Lagunas-Frank-Zanderink: Darko Lagunas with whale researcher Frank Zanderink in the Delta region.

The Embassy of the North Sea sees itself as a context for practicing what political representation could mean in practice. Law is one aspect of that. But it is also looking at engaging existing structures within society; the role of NGO’s, trade-unions, SME’s, lobby groups, advisory boards, etc.

Part of our fieldwork in the Delta region is also connecting to those layers of human society. In other words we may need trade-union fictions, lobby group fictions, just as much as coastal-engineering fictions.

I’ll refer to an often quoted saying, that if the previous century was a century of physics, the current century must be a century of ecology. I think Bioart in its broadest sense is a cultural reaction to this shift. To me it resonates strongly with why I was so into drawing as a youngster. To me drawing was a way of studying the world. Quite a classical notion, I guess. I think I inherited this from my father, who painted our local landscape, but who also built a domed telescope observatory on the back of the house. So that kind of art-science vibe was really present in my childhood and I recognize it also in Bioart. I don’t really think of what I do in terms of Bioart, or even as art in general to be honest. I am just contining to relate to the world as I did when I was a child. I mean with that sense of being unrestricted. I’ll try to clarify:

The most ancient, long-lasting human cultures were structured to be deeply tied to the processes and cycles of the human psyche, the living lands, the changing seas, the breathing skies and the expanse of the cosmos. That is no longer the case for many of us. In industrialized societies many people live very reduced lives, cut off from the realms of other life-forms, the skies, the sea, the celestial bodies and even our own bodies. As a child I struggled to see a place for myself in that society, because I didn’t want to be reduced to anything less than a human being in relationship with the entire universe. Don’t worry, I didn’t think of myself as a god-like celestial being, but more in the way the poet Rumi reminds us, “you are not a drop in the ocean; you are the entire ocean in a drop.” So going to art school worked really well for me as a way to navigate along the edges of a society whose core values seemed so uninviting. It offers you a platform from which to engage with all layers of society, because you make up your own rules and methods really.

And nobody sees you as a threat, because you are ‘just an artist’. In Bioart very different questions tend to be posed than in an ecological study and that is part of its value.

My friends who are Elders among the Maasia, the Paniya, the Odjibwe, the Saami and the Alifuru all share similar fundamental views on humanity. We are a custodial species. These elders remember it, but all children know it. Their beds are full of furry toy-animals. We are fundamentally interested in other beings. For the vast majority of human evolution we were material and spiritual caretakers of lands, seas, biomes. The dichotomy between wilderness and cultivated land blinds westernized minds to the much broader cultural spectrum of human activity. We are the gardening ape.

Tyson Yukaporta writes somewhere in his book Sand Talk that to an ancient culture like the Aboriginal peoples of Australia questions like; why are we here, what is the point of life?’, are clear signs. Signs of a juvenile culture. We need to mature. We need to remember who we are.

This includes reflecting on how we value other life forms. As Thomas Thwaites observed when he was one of our artists-in-residence in ARTIS Amsterdam Royal Zoo; we should not underestimate how hard it is for us (Westernized minds) to not patronize animals. And I’d add to that: all kinds of other-than-human life. That inability to recognize the wisdom of animals and plants is an unbelievably short-sighted mind-set to have on the only known planet to support life, but well.. here we are..

Darko-Lagunas-Siegfried-Steglich-colonial-traces: Darko Lagunas and retired nautical pilot Siegfried Steglich retracing colonial routes on the Westerschelde river.

If we address language here, then we must start by addressing the word ‘nature’. Nature is the problem, as Timothy Morton famously entitled his book on the subject. That it exists in our language signals a separation that few other languages make, between human realms and all the rest. And the assumption in your question, and in much of science, that nature is something that can be comprehended is running into some fundamental walls in various scientific fields.

Theunis Piersma a renowned Dutch ornithologist wrote a book De Ontsnapping van de Natuur (The Un-understanding of Nature) a few years ago about his frustrations. His study of the interactions between shorebird populations, mollusc populations, and environmental factors rapidly spiralled out of control when shorebird diets turned out to respond to many factors and across summer and winter domains with a geographic spread stretching from the summer habitat in Northern Europe to their winter habitat in Africa. So the potential area that impacts feeding behaviour is half the planet. On closer inspection the birds also displayed significant variation in their personal diets and preferences. Piersma concluded that bird behaviour changes yearly, even at the level of individual birds, let alone the population. He didn’t even start with studying the molluscs. No general formulation of bird behaviour would do justice to the variety and complexity of interactions between these birds and their prey.

Some species are “not fit for statistics” field ecologist Sander Turnhout phrased it during the Random Forests field-research session I organised on one of the Dutch Islands. Random Forests was a field research program that looked at the impact of artificial intelligence on our understanding (and governance of) our landscapes and the populations of other-than-humans that live in them.

I thought that taking the viewpoint of machine learning was interesting because, as a fundamentally naïve entity, it might reflect some of our human biases. For all of existence biological beings have been trying to make sense of their environment and now these artificial entities are joining us. That is a very interesting moment which Random Forests tried to get a sense of; where might machines complement us, where are they vulnerable to our biases and what agency might they have? To investigate these questions, we applied them to Terschelling one of the smaller Dutch Wadden Sea Islands. We looked at what information sources were there. What kind of language is prevalent and where this artificial agent might be able to act on the island.

These discussions about environmental machine learning led to an exploration which I collaborated on with Ian Ingram, who builds robots that try to communicate with wild animals, like crows, squirrels and pigeons. Our thinking was that if machine learning is so very much tailored to human obsessions, needs, frustrations, and ambitions, don’t they deserve a break? Should an AI be allowed to expand its horizon? Have the weekend off to float around a coral reef? Get stuck in a swamp? Just watch some birds in the park? Surely when our human obsession and ambitions are seriously endangering planetary wellbeing, these artificial entities should not learn exclusively from us? Why, among the millions of different intelligences that populate the planet, should it only learn from one?

We tried to build a small machine learning system called Deep Steward and our long-term aim is for it to be able to be posted anywhere and be deployed in various environments. An early iteration observed a tree outside the Dutch pavilion during the Milan Triennale for a few months. Making up classifications and language for what it observed largely unsupervised by us, its human creators. In a way we thought it could be a machine-in-residence instead of us artists. And groups of Deep Stewards could build up intimate knowledge about different biomes on our planet.

What struck me deeply when I first encountered Ian’s robots is that they are not there to clean up the environment, or protect some specific organism. Their mission is not to affect, but to relate. Ian’s approach has taught me such amazing lessons. Nevermore-A-Matic, his robot that is primed to corvids (crow family of birds), tries to communicate through gesture. So does his lizard robot, but much more limited because it is a gesture that only demarcates territories. His robot called Danger-Squirrel-Nutkin attempts to join squirrel life through the alarm signal that is given by squirrel tails.

So yes languages abound. They are pluriform, they can be local, they can be rooted in millennia of evolution, adapt to new circumstances. Language is part of our ability to relate.

The desert of New Mexico must be one of the most surreal places on Earth, with the Apache and Navajo pueblos, the cowboy ranches, the UFO museums and the nuclear test sites. In the university library in Albuquerque among endless rows of books, somehow a small booklet stood out because of its title: Research is Ceremony. In the book, Shawn Wilson who identifies as a Cree from the Opaskwayak Nation in New South Wales, Australia, describes his difficulties of incorporating what is understood as research in his native culture, with his academic study at the university.

His description of aboriginal indigenous research is as brief as it is stunning: “Indigenous research is the ceremony of maintaining accountability to all our relationships.”

Over the past decade Shawn’s words have increasingly resonated with me. I think the model I’ve been operating by is practicing exposure. In a rapidly changing and unravelling world, fieldwork and in-situ experiments have become vital parts to my practice.

Being out there in the full complexity of the world is important, because we think and act differently in the presence of other beings. It is much easier to feel confident in a room full of people and a PowerPoint-slide, than it is in a thunderstorm without a raincoat. I mean, to really engage with the complexities of the world, it helps to be in that world with others, including other-than-humans. In field research your local guides often turn out be very different than you imagined. They may not even be human.

Some forms information have been valued for a very long time. That kind of information is called wisdom. I’m attracted perhaps not so much to up-to-date information, but more on neglected information. I’m quite keen on archeology for example, as a portal to past experiences.

For instance; how did people live through previous climate change events? How did the people who re-entered North Western Europe after the retreating ice adapt to what was a fundamentally disrupted space? Because not only humans were repopulating that area, but so were plants, animals, trees, spreading from small pockets and refugia. Rivers were finding their way along with these people as they walked. What qualities helped them cope? What mindset?

That long term perspective helps me ground. And more broadly I think a long-term perspective helps us find appropriate questions. That feels to me as our most fundamental task in such turbulent times.

Ian-Ingram-Amsterdam-zoo-crowrobot: Ian Ingram installing Nevermore-A-Matic in ARTIS Royal Zoo.

What helps me is to garden. Five gardens are now under my care. Many of them with others. Mostly urban gardens in Amsterdam, some more rural. I try to foster as much life in them as I can. So they look quite wild and it is encouraging to see how much people appreciate that, which is a really big adjustment in landscape aesthetics for the Dutch!

Since this year this includes a floating garden in Westerpark to celebrate the return of the otter to the capital after fifty years of absence. I like to think that its return during a time of unprecedented drought is a message. I’m hoping this iconic animal can help us rediscover our love for water-rich landscapes. In any case the otter is helping me discover ‘watergardening’ and it is really great!

otter-floating-garden: The floating garden in Westerpark celebrating the return of the otter to the city.

otter-floating-garden workshop