Woodland – Denmark - 2014

In recent years, during Oerol at Terschelling, a number of projects of SLeM were entitled as ‘Sense of Place’ sharing the research topic of Cultural Landscape Development, such as Pannenland in 2013 and Wadland in 2014. ‘Woodland’ is the next project in this series, now as part of the Vadehavsfestival “Wadden Tide 2014” in Blåvand, Denmark. For ‘Wadden Tide’ artists were asked that originate from countries that are dealing with the direct influences of the tides.

SLeM built the project ‘Woodland’ at the most northern beach of the Wadden Sea, in September 2014. An extraordinary landscape of one hundred thirty thousand skewers (bamboo sticks) to which more than two hundred and twenty people, in particular young people, participated to build. In our perception a landscape becomes a landscape when it is made up of many similar elements that are spatially arranged in such a way that the boundaries of the landscape are not always recognizable. You can find yourself surrounded by a new and surprising atmosphere.

The project is based on “Africado” an experiment in 2006 in West Africa, where Bruno Doedens built a ‘one-day’ landscape with African children.

Woodland is a delicate, poetic landscape, built by the mobilization of social energy. The dynamic natural formation processes of the Wadden Sea are visualized in a poetic and theatrical way. ‘Woodland’ is fragile and vulnerable and thereby symbolizes the ‘dance between human and nature’. It strives to bring nature and culture closer together in a visual and playful way.

The building activity is filmed as being a theatrical act, a slow script. Also time-lapse film-recordings were made to register the natural processes of the tides, wind, sand movements, and the changing shadows of the wooden sticks due to the rotation of the earth.