Roots | Inge Meijer

ROOTS – Inge Meijer
Curated by Madelon van Schie and Iñaki Chávarri

Every year Casa Kanú invites an artist connected to the Netherlands to become acquainted with the local context of Bogotá and to present new work in an individual exhibition at HHH dimensión cultural, its the project space. This year Inge Meijer (1986, The Netherlands) was selected in collaboration with art historian Madelon van Schie.

ROOTS presents a new work that Meijer developed in the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, in combination with a selection of existing pieces. Together, the videos and photos question our relation with our natural surroundings.

Inge Meijer is an artist who observes. From sheer amazement she approaches social and cultural phenomena expressed in routine situations of the everyday, and that are overlooked by the most of us. With a keen eye for the ‘unnoticed absurd’ and a compelling imagination for the ‘potential common’ she creates intriguing, sometimes incongruous cut-out scenes that playfully provoke us to question our worldview. What do we actually consider to be normal, and how come?

In ROOTS Meijer turns to our interaction with plants, focusing on the precarious balance between our compassion and sincere appreciation of nature on the one hand and our attempt to control and dominate it on the other. Her photos and videos touch upon the affective relation we maintain with plants inside our houses and in public spaces, they point out the absurdity of our self-entitlement to (re)move them, and introduce an unexpected, alternative narrative that may allude to the emancipation of nature. The exhibition also comprises a site-specific intervention. The windows of the project space are covered with leaves found in Bogotá. They poetically refer to the other extreme of plants; the flexible and unsustainable counterparts of roots. Or as Emanuele Coccia, a philosopher Meijer admires, remarked: “Plants are both aerial and subterranean. They’re the mediating agents between earth and sky.”

The photo series The Plant Collection represents a selection of the domesticated exotic plants from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Between 1945 and the early 1980s the museum made a habit of including plants in its exhibitions. They were taken care of by museum guard Mr. van der Ham, presented at one photo amicably standing next to a large tobacco plant. As two companions they look outside the window, where the outlines of trees subtly hint at life outside of the museum walls. The plants were placed to brighten up the exhibition rooms, to support the experience of looking at art, and perhaps unconsciously, the living and impermanent ‘natural’ also served to emphasize the timeless permanence of the art works. In a way there are similarities between the plants and security guards, as observed by the artist. Both are simultaneously present and absent, remaining virtually unnoticed as quiet witnesses to all that is happening around them.

In the video Maple Tree another peculiar but accepted phenomenon is brought to the fore. We see an uprooted tree passing will-less on a trailer through a typical Dutch (culturally shaped) landscape. The image has something utterly alienating. It is both grotesque and, despite the sunny weather, gloomy, which is emphasized by the ominous sound created by K. Ellington Mingus. Disconnected from his soil, the tree is entrained in a state in between belonging and becoming.

In this sense Maple Tree forms a fascinating pendant with Meijer’s latest project Guards of Gardens, a video shot at the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, a building that is characterized by a strong modernist atmosphere. The location is not only interesting for its architectural splendor, that offer some very strong compositions, but also for the public and democratic function the library holds in the otherwise quite segregated city.

Although displacement continues to be a guiding theme in Guards of Gardens, in this work the plants have turned into active protagonists. Registered by security cameras, some of the plants slowly start to move and traverse the spaces. The work is at times hilarious, absurd and frightening, turning us into silent witnesses this time.

From its own, original angle the work relates to the current attention for the annulation of the distinction between the human and non-human and for an upgrade of the position of plants, such as propagated by the already named Emanuele Coccia. Also writers such as Peter Wohlleben and Eduardo Kohn have contributed to a revision of our interactions with plants. Both argue that plants are capable of much more than we thought possible. Of thinking, communicating and functioning as families for instance. In fact, Darwin already predicted that plants would obtain, and display, their power to move when it is of some advantage. Within the specific context of the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango, Colombia’s stronghold of knowledge and reason, this uncanny secret life of plants may also well be interpreted as a small but distinct act of protest. 

Stichting Stokroos supports this project.