NOME is pleased to announce Tracing Memories, a solo exhibition by the Belgian artist Maarten Vanden Eynde. A core aspect of Vanden Eynde’s artistic research is what he calls “genetology”—or the science of first things. Genetology addresses humans’ fascination with time and its consequences: How will we look back to the past in the future? What will remain of the present? Working across media, his practice unravels the process and consequence of time to explore how raw materials “traveling through time and space“ are ensnared within “the vortex of political, cultural, and social agendas that shape history.“ His explorations of these subjects draw upon diverse fields of study and social contexts that range from marine biology and cosmology to social anthropology and futurology.
The exhibition Tracing Memories continues Vanden Eynde’s ongoing research into the evolution of methods and tools that humans applied to augment their memory and knowledge and how this intersects with how we might remember the past in the future. Riffing on the format of a cabinet of curiosities, the exhibition articulates speculative narratives that might help unearth the mysteries of human knowledge production and preservation through memory. Future Flora: Manono consists of various graphic translations of Lithium ore reserves in the Democratic Republic of Congo, surrounded by the outlines of the mining concession of the Australian mining company AVZ Minerals. The map was transferred onto a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) and embellished with a wide variety of seeds and grains collected on-site in Manono, representing transistors and electrical components. Together they mimic a lukasa or ‘memory board’ like those historically used in the region as archives for the topographical and chronological mapping of political histories and as a means of remembering important people, places, and mythical migration routes. The seeds are organised in relation to the graphic outlines of the mining concession and evoke the memory of seed collection, preservation, modification and militarisation.
At the same time, they literally act as a back-up for rare plant species that sometimes grow only on one specific hill or in one particular valley as a result of the presence of certain minerals in the soil. They can be used to recreate the original fauna and flora when the mining activities have ended. Vanden Eynde’s explorations of memory, materiality, and history understand history and time less as an “amalgam of independent moments and momentums” and more as a rhizome or chain of interconnected activities. He writes, “Only by following ripples that occur when a stone hits the water, going as wide as one possibly can in all directions, is it possible to come full circle, and understand evolutions in deep time.” Tracing Memories follows such ripples, into the depths of history and visions for the future.
TRACING MEMORIES by Ilse Roosens
From a distant future, Maarten Vanden Eynde trains his eye on the past – our current present. Future species will form an impression of today’s world based on what we leave behind. Certain buildings, objects and written sources will still exist, others will be excavated and researched. Some will be impossible to find and the missing information will be a source of conjecture. Our lifestyles, choices and principles will be mulled over, in much the same way that contemporary historians reflect on the past. Maarten Vanden Eynde’s artistic practice questions our current society from a possible future perspective, and the way in which we make choices today that influence the future.
Cave paintings, collections, footprints: remains of human presence offer an insight into the life of our predecessors. Stories are subsequently constructed on the basis of all the collected source material. And when this is lacking, historians delight in freely completing the gaps in the puzzle. Indeed, we look at history with a certain gaze and expectation, and it is tempting to project answers in the absence of clarity. For example, a patriarchal bias leads archaeologists to suggest that prehistoric biological men were hunters, while most researchers discount certain facts in this respect, or endlessly question them. After Maarten Vanden Eynde broke a ceramic beaker in 2004 in Japan (Genetologic Research No. 18) and in so doing created a potential archaeological find, he decided to turn words into deeds by burying the most popular IKEA tea cup, as the most significant piece of crockery of our era, in the Roman forum (Preservation of IKEA tea-cup, 2005). A few years later, he let his imagination run wild when repairing an IKEA cup that had been broken in this way. He thought that the fragments would provide sufficient inspiration to allow a future archaeologist to assemble them into a true IKEA Vase (2011).
This series of artworks plays with the idea of an archaeological find. The majority of objects that are excavated were once buried beneath rubble by something like an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, and hence preserved. They were not deliberately conserved. In combination with all the objects that were consciously saved for the future, they form the basis for archaeological and historic research. As a result, organic materials that do not stand the test of time are often overlooked. Perhaps the most valuable sources were therefore wiped out, and we overestimate the importance of those finds that we do have at our disposal. Today there is an even greater challenge for the preservation of knowledge via digital channels. Art historians who can currently still base their research on exchanges of letters between artists, will in the future be hindered by the transience of chat discussions and emails. The speed with which we switch from one channel to another and the fragility of digital archives are a future problem that should not be underestimated. In the work A Chain of Events (2020-2021) we see both organic materials and industrial objects that were utilised in human trade and communication. It starts with cotton thread and ends – temporarily at least – with wafer-thin fibreglass cables through which data is transported. It depicts a historical succession of global exchanges that run into and influence one another. Hence it represents a non-linear historical account in which clearly demarcated events are non-existent. Maarten Vanden Eynde thus questions the way in which we engage in historiography, because aside from all the coincidental finds that supplement the knowledge of the past, there is of course the conscious choice to record our history.
By writing history, humans try to direct the information that will survive them. An ingenious selection of information finds its way into books, and attempts will sometimes be made to destroy certain publications. We choose which messages we send into space on the Voyager Golden Record and which statues we place in the public domain. History books teach us the most important events, or at least what the authors consider to be essential. Moreover, it would be troublesome to explain the principles of conflicting parties on the losing side in such a way as to prompt understanding in the reader, and so factual information is also selected from a subjective point of view. The curriculum for schools is purportedly fixed, and yet is regularly adjusted as a result of growing insight. A great deal of knowledge is not retained because it is considered unimportant or is not even visible. Scant attention is paid to crafts today, for example, meaning that these disciplines are at risk of being lost. Collectives such as The Black Archives devote themselves to conserving source material relating to people of colour. That is to say, choices around archiving and knowledge sharing say a great deal about what is regarded as relevant by a society and what is not.
The blackboard green that has regularly served as a backdrop to Maarten Vanden Eynde’s works since the exhibition Digging up the Future (Mu.ZEE Ostend, BE, 2020-2021; La Kunsthalle Mulhouse, FR, 2022) thus refers to the role of knowledge and education. Material Matters (2018-2019) makes a case for knowledge sharing throughout the entire production chain: from the point that mining commences to the moment an end product is developed. Here too the artist plays with a formal language that catapults us into the classrooms. He collaborated with the artist Musasa, known for his educational painting style, and refers to old school maps. In reality, knowledge is less rigid than the way it is presented in the Western school system. The Lukasa, a kind of palm-sized memory aid, is an object that improves our receptiveness to new insights and yet builds on the knowledge that has already been acquired. Maarten Vanden Eynde made a series of works that allude to this instrument. Memory of Man (2022) mimics a Lukasa and combines different enlarged computer elements with scratches in the marble surface. Computers are massive game changers when it comes to memory and processing power. Lukasa allow more room for interpretation and development, and the scratches – alluding to cave paintings – also refer to historical and more receptive tools for knowledge transfer. In opening up his work, Maarten Vanden Eynde also plays with different ways of sharing information. In his monograph Digging for the Future, curator and editor Katerina Gregos provided an encyclopaedic overview while curator Nav Haq contributed a science fiction essay. The audio guide to the accompanying exhibition offered interpretations from climate scientists, decolonial thinkers and activist artists, and for his PhD at the University of Bergen Maarten Vanden Eynde wrote a classic scientific text with references to empirical literature. All these forms of knowledge sharing can exist side by side, be complementary, and question one another.
Central to Maarten Vanden Eynde’s work is this critical, open stance towards knowledge of the present, the past and the future. His gaze from a remote future helps him to question contemporary society. The knowledge that a distant descendant will study our lifestyles enables us to see both ourselves and contemporary society in a new light. We succeed in taking a little more distance and approaching our environment more critically. By zooming out, we see processes that are underway and changes that are taking place. Individual human concerns shift to the background, while other living species once again claim their role as protagonist and thus shake up assumed hierarchies: for example, coral is suffering from the presence of humans, yet the reefs are vital to the survival of marine life. Time is also transformed when subjected to a future gaze. The passage of a single human on Earth seems insignificant. What are impressive, however, are artistic, scientific and technological achievements and inventions. Humans have achieved a great deal in a short period. These achievements will have an immense impact on the future. We rarely ask ourselves what future species will think of the actions we undertake today, or whether these deeds will have major consequences for subsequent populations. Maarten Vanden Eynde both depicts the possible negative consequences of our behaviour and issues a wake-up call by pointing to the positive impact that humans can have. Not only do we write history, but we also make the future.
Ilse Roosens is a curator currently working at Mu.ZEE in Ostend (BE), the museum for modern and contemporary Belgian art. Post-colonial, geopolitical, ecofeminist and post-capitalist topics lay the groundwork for her work both inside and outside the museum. Ilse Roosens questions existing power structures and focuses on the social responsibility of institutions, governments and artists. Co-authorship and polyphony are focal points of her working ethic. She is actively rethinking the formats for presenting collections by experimenting with transhistorical and transcultural concepts.
At Mu.ZEE Ilse Roosens curated exhibitions such as ‘Maarten Vanden Eynde — Digging up the Future’ (2021) together with Katerina Gregos, ‘Wintrum Frod. Orla Barry & Els Dietvorst’ (2019), ‘Frans Masereel and contemporary art: images of resistance’ (2017) and ‘Carsten Höller. Videoretrospective with Two Lightmachines’ (2016). She published several catalogues and curated different public programmes accompanying the exhibitions. In 2018 she co-founded the MEER curatorial collective, focusing on artists working with video and performance art. Prior to Mu.ZEE she worked at S.M.A.K. Ghent and Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp and as a freelance curator and mediator.
Notes
Ilse Roosens
