Artist: Moniek Driesse
Installation: Poster Art Collart
A hint of fugitive times, within and beyond fences
- This text is an adapted version of the similarly titled essay in the monograph “Leaving Dry Land: Water, Heritage and Imaginary Agency”. (1) In the context of the monograph, the essay is part of a sequence of reflections emerging from the performance lecture “Imagining the In-between of Land and Water” (2) that enacted a journey following the waters of the Göta Älv through various times and scales, involving all the senses.
Drifting further along the Göta Älv, in Scene 9 of the performance lecture, ‘A hidden forest to hide in’, we come ashore at a site where the barriers created around our lives become clearly visible. We face fences around an oil refinery, a power plant and a sewage treatment plant. Yellow and red prohibition signs on the fence make clear that no one is allowed to film, photograph or trespass. When turning 180 degrees, a patch of green space appears, and we enter a forest with large oak trees, squeezed between the industrial areas just west of the Älvsborg bridge on the northern bridgehead. Besides the centuries-old oak trees, this marsh forest, named Rya Skog (Rya Forest), displays a very diverse flora and fauna.
In 1923, botanist Carl Skottsberg described the area as a friendly oasis and the last remnant of a formerly grand forested landscape. (3) Skottsberg’s words were an appeal for the protection of Rya Forest in a time of rapid industrialisation. The site was declared the region’s first nature reserve in 1928 after a threat of deforestation because of the city’s expansion toward the west and protests by the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation. Still, the area has been targeted repeatedly by industry and commerce—little by little, parts of its territory have been chipped away on the edges for the construction of infrastructure, pipelines for oil and water and the construction of the sewage plant. However, over the years, because of the protection of Rya Forest, the surrounding industry has also expanded vertically—for example, newer technologies made it possible to build higher oil cisterns. As the project of industrialisation on a global scale has transformed its scope into a level that now has a geological impact and humans have become terraforming beings, it is here conquering the skies rather than occupying more land and water. Now, being around and in Rya Forest, it is difficult to perceive whether we are inside or outside the fences. What does become apparent though is that the protection from deforestation allowed this site to become a reminder of permanence and slow growth, in contrast with the rapid tempo of urban expansions. The so-called allemansrätten, the right of public access, applies here, which is summarised by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency as ‘do not disturb, do not destroy’. This demand for caution and consideration creates an opportunity to take refuge in this forest.
During this scene of the performance lecture, the scent of forest grounds is perceivable—a steam vaporizer on the table slowly distributes the smell of spruce (Picea), larch (Larix decidua) and juniper berry (Juniperus communis). Various members of the audience come closer to experience the smell more intensely because the smell does not travel through the air so far as to reach the back of the room. Once there, they touch the branches of the watermint (Mentha aquatica) that is standing in a jar next to the vaporizer—what they thought would be a familiar smell of mint, surprisingly, has a slight hint of petrol in it. In the meantime, a marsh beer is served, containing the same ingredients as the distillation in the vaporizer. The beer, as well as the distillation, affects the airways, creating a space to take deep breaths.
The narrative in this scene of the performance lecture suggests that, despite the fences—and many other constructed divisions in the city—the culture we built is inextricably entangled with nature. Although understanding the entanglements of the human city-building project, as well as other times and places that enable and sustain the project, can be helpful to imagine a reciprocal relation with our environment, critiques on the vanishing distinctions between nature and culture seem to be pertinent here. Andreas Malm argues that, in an age denominated as the Anthropocene, actively putting limits around the social realm instead of further ‘annexing’ nature might be necessary to allow for contextualisation and critical reflections on the impacts of human actions. (4) Taking this further, Virginie Maris suggests that the idea of being able to manage or control everything around us is upheld by a blending of boundaries, which is simply not possible as many things escape our understanding, our perception and our imagination. She argues that the climate crisis requires us to recognise and respect other beings and inanimates that humans share their space with and, even more, to acknowledge that humans might not be able to know everything, thus accepting the ‘unknowable’. (5) These arguments give clear clues in the search for a fugitive space amid urban development projects guided by capital—a retreat from fast-paced and divided city life, where we can shapeshift and try out new forms of community building. To allow for shapeshifting metonymic relations and significations to be drawn, Maris’ argument for creating more ‘wild nature’ seems pertinent for imagination to wonder more broadly and recognise other beings in their own realities, acting according to their own logics and creating their own agency, all in relation with others. (6)
If we accept the hypothesis of the Anthropocene, the idea that human beings are now the prime geological force of the earth system, the danger is one of responsibility. To the modernist idea of industry, prevailing in the nineteenth century, it must be liberating to finally be crowned as conqueror. It is this conquest of imagination that an understanding and acknowledgement of the others—with whom we share the planet—is an antidote for. With the declaration of Rya Forest as a natural reserve and prohibition ‘to cut down trees and bushes, to break twigs or remove them from the ground, to pick flowers, to hunt and kill animals or snatch bird eggs, to erect buildings, to make fire, and to let cattle graze’ (7), environmentalists expressed concerns that the forest went wild and was becoming an ‘impenetrable, jungle-like and severely brushy’ and, as a consequence, less attractive and accessible. (8) It became clear that Rya Forest had not been a wild forest, where nature itself has been the sole gardener but was shaped by foraging and other forms of maintenance. (9) Although the rewilding has been tamed, nowadays, the forest is still a lush oasis amid a grey industrial landscape.
The contrast is clear. Intense odours coming from the sewage treatment plant find their way across the fences and into the forest, blending in with the earthy smells of decaying logs—just like the smell of watermint (Mentha aquatica) revealed a hint of petrol in it. Comfort can be found when looking up—in a similar vertical movement of expansion as the oil cisterns, the oak trees in Rya Forest exhibit what botanists call ‘crown shyness’, ‘growing tall instead of wide to be able to resist, together, showing us how to make space for each other’. (10) In the forest, what can be interpreted as destruction or decay very often becomes a force of creation—a mortuary becomes a nursery for other species to thrive. Rather than a space for continuous growth in all directions, the ‘wild nature’ of Rya Forest, when given time to adapt, allows for different lives—in plural—to emerge. Although humans here have an active role as place-makers, they are not necessarily the only kind of active force at play. When recognising other-than-humans as characters in an unfolding narrative that traces metonymic significations rooted in varying timeframes, new stories can emerge that abandon the modernist human drive for subjective supremacy.
www.moniekdriesse.com
www.artcollart.nl
- Driesse, Moniek. 2023. Leaving dry land: Water, heritage, and imaginary agency. Gothenburg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, Gothenburg Studies in Conservation.
- Driesse, Moniek i.c.w. Maidie van den Bos & Sjamme van de Voort. “Imagining the in-between of land and water”. IABR Waterweek, Rotterdam, 12 May 2022. Performance lecture.
- Skottsberg, Carl. 1923. “Göteborgstraktens växtvärld.” Göteborgstraktens natur, edited by Otto Nordenskjöld, 289–332. Gothenburg: Göteborgs jubileumspublikationer.
- Malm, Andreas. 2018. The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London, New York: Verso.
- Maris, Virginie. 2021. Het wilde deel van de wereld. [Original: La part sauvage du monde] Amsterdam: Boom.
- For notions on relational agency, see: Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.
- Billing, Björn. 2020. “Rya Forest Nature Reserve: A Case of Preservation, Conflicts, and Unwanted Rewilding.” Arcadia: Explorations in Environmental History Spring (6). Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.
- Feodor Aminoff, quoted in: Malmström, Carl. 1962. Rya skog i Göteborg. Gothenburg: Skogssällskapet.
- Liljedahl, Axel. 1921. “Rya skog vid Göteborg: En viktig naturskyddsfråga för västkusten.” Sveriges Natur: Svenska Naturskyddsföreningens årsskrift 72–79.
- See, for example: Hallé, Francis. 2001. “Branching in Plants.” Branching in Nature: Dynamics and Morphogenesis of Branching Structures, from Cell to River Networks, edited by Vincent Fleury, J-F. Gouyet and Marc Leonetti. Berlin: Springer Science & Business Media.