THIS ENTANGLED LAND

Film THIS ENTANGLED LAND

This Entangled Land

My film This Entangled Land (24', 2022) has been screened at RADIUS Center for Art and Ecology (Delft), Zone2Source (Amsterdam), and under the trees in Amstelpark, near the Zone2Source Park Studio, Amsterdam.

This Entangled Land was an award winner at the Mannheim Art & Film Festival 2022. 

I released fungi-related sections of This Entangled Land (shown here) to mark the launch of SPUN - Society for the Protection go Underground Networks. The film features an interview with Toby Kiers, Executive Director & Chief Scientist at SPUN - Society for the Protection of Underground Networks and Professor of Evolutionary Biology and University Research Chair at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. I've been working with research into arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and plant-fungal interactions from Toby Kiers' Lab at Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam for more than a decade. My film This Entangled Land is a visual and sonic tapestry of social, biological and cultural interactions. Its narratives weave their way along a logging road in Borneo, branch off into villages and languages, zoom in on fungal networks in the soil and zoom out to view their global impact.

The screening at RADIUS Delft was accompanied by a lecture by Toby Kiers on mycorrhizal fungi and the work of SPUN. The screening at Zone2Source was accompanied by a lecture by Malin Klein on mycorrhizal fungi and their interactions with plants in the soil. She showed some of the latest research and images from the Kiers and Kokkoris Labs (VU Amsterdam) and SPUN. Malin is a PhD candidate in the Toby Kiers Lab at the Amsterdam Institute for Life and Environment (A-LIFE), Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam where she was previously a research technician.

DURN THAT ROAD

Durn that Road - Bradwolff Projects Amsterdam


From top: Logging in Sarawak (R.I.L. Howland 1963); cargo distribution diagram (cross-section) (R.I.L. Howland 1964); Cargo Notes (1962).


Pages from Dr Beatrice Clayre's Sa'ban-Malay-English picture dictionary; video of interview "Last Time" - Before the Road.  ©2019

 

ESSAY

Mark That Maps Itself: On Roads That Lead Nowhere

by Alena Alexandrova, based on her lecture about Annabel’s work and this exhibition in particular.

 

ROAD – associated with horizontality, expansive, causes flattening.

FOREST – a living network, vertical, and thick, creates its own climate.

TREE TRUNK – its rings are a record of time, circular and layered, they become visible only when the tree is cut, at the moment of its death.

FALLING – the change between vertical and horizontal states associated with becoming dead and motionless, but also with becoming transportable.

STACKING – the piling up of different materials and commodities, which previously belonged to different contexts, in order to store and transport them. This results in a strange form of flattening. Flattening is an entropic process.

FLOWING – mobility, resistance to containment, but also relating to leaking and flooding.

WORDS – can be seen as flat, and flattening, insofar as they come with the building of roads. Can be seen as vertical, insofar as they capture the complexity of local habitats.

FOLIAGE – immersive environment, impenetrable surface to blend with and disappear.

VERTICALS – generally static, articulating long, deep time, associated with life.

HORIZONTALS – generally mobile, articulating fast time, associated with death, flattening.

ROOTS and root-like structures – should never become visible, or brought to the surface. When they do become visible, they form a network of marks that can signify stasis and death.

Durn That Road (2019) by Annabel Howland is a work that witnesses a journey to an island and its people, gestures, words, animals and plants. The installation consists of material collected on journeys to Borneo. A constellation of vertically and horizontally organized photos and film stills, field recordings, an interview and documentary excerpts together compose an installation that outlines the invisible flows of capital that determine the visible devastation of a landscape.

Durn That Road does not narrate, it is not exactly a travelogue, nor is it a field study. It articulates the visibility of the complex forces that determine an unfolding ecological disaster in a grid-like structure composed of horizontal and vertical planes. The verticals are formed by a constellation of aerial views showing expansive networks of roads that penetrate the land, but lead nowhere. The logging sites and roads form a strange flat, root-like structure that grips the land, transforming it into a barren, surveyable territory. The vertical collages also show aerial views of the forest as a thick surface of tree crowns; a deep green, soft pattern. They suggest the structure of sedimentation, or geological layers that form in deep time and resonate with the living time of one of the oldest rainforests on the planet.

The installation includes field recordings of the sounds of the forest and their modulation through the process of deforestation. The ambient sound of the forest changes in texture depending on where the logging sites are, so one can literally hear the flattening in the texture of sounds. The voice of children reading a dictionary of a local language Sa’ban, resonates with the sounds of a land gradually losing its voice with the destruction of its forests. In a filmed interview shown on a screen, three Sa’ban people discuss how the new road connecting their village to the city is changing communal living and their relationship to money. The interview captures a similar process of flattening, or erosion, that affects the delicate social networks of extended families and their everyday lives. The semi-nomadic use of land by family groups gradually transforms into a more settled use of the land, often nearer the road. Roads improve access to education and paid work, but also to building materials, leading to a dilution of social relations as families begin to live in individual houses instead of communal longhouses. Game hunted in the forest can now be sold, instead of shared with the community. The horizontal penetration of the land for the use of its resources causes its social textures to fragment and flatten, and perhaps, over time, brings about the gradual loss of complexity in its local languages.

An enlarged bulk cargo distribution diagram and pages from a ‘cargo notes’ instruction manual from 1964 describe how raw materials from across southeast Asia – timber, latex, apricot kernels, frozen rabbits, chicken eggs, and many other commodities – were to be stowed in ships’ holds for export to Europe. Composed of verticals and horizontals, the diagram and notes articulate a language of capture, of translation of the land into goods and materials, and point to the shallow, accelerated time of trade, the export of materials, and to financial flows. Horizontals and verticals form the generic infrastructure of grids, and grids establish an abstract, homogeneous flatness that is very different from the folds and crevices of a space understood as an environment or a habitat. Living trees become horizontal logs. Verticals converted into horizontals mark a loss of complexity; a transformation of complex, dense planes of a habitat into surveyable surfaces and, hence, death.

Horizontals and verticals relate to different types of visibility and embodied experiences. Being in the forest, in an environment composed of vertical trees, implies a relation of immersion. In contrast, a view from above captures the land as a horizontal, observable, mappable surface. This cartographic view establishes a territory as an abstract plane, it “abstracts” it into a virtual model, an informative capture of a territory with its network of roads. But in Durn That Road the photo collage of aerial views of the networked marks of the logging roads are not a representation of the roads on the island; they are very concrete and in a sense tautological; they are roads with no other function than the extraction of resources, and they signify nothing other than their own presence. They chart a map of disaster, not a place; they are a mark of destructive and invisible flows of financial capital and corruption.

The composition of vertical and horizontal planes resonates with the rhythm of two temporal perspectives, more precisely with their clash: the accelerated time of extraction and destruction and the deep time of one of the oldest rainforests on earth. This marks a crisis of human self-understanding under the conditions of technological modernity, which brings acceleration and complexity, but is also an entropic process of flattening. Durn That Road does not exactly produce a documentary or investigative report. Rather, it creates an open fragment that witnesses different aspects of forces that simultaneously build and ruin. And it witnesses the accelerated rhythm of resource extraction, which results in a future that fails before it is reached. Howland’s practice observes and articulates the visibility of speculative interactions between a range of complex systems which, though not usually visible, are always omnipresent.

Alena Alexandrova, Amsterdam 2019

 

PRESS RELEASE

Durn That Road

Sunday 20th January to 17th February 2019

Annabel Howland’s artworks weave speculative webs around ecology, finance and art. Looking through the lenses of different fields of research, she unpicks, isolates and reweaves threads from these systems. The resulting installations constantly shift between scales and perspectives in attempts to fathom and imagine the systems’ complex twists.

The title, Durn That Road, quotes the character Anse Bundren in William Faulkner’s 1930 novel As I Lay Dying. Anse is introduced to us through his rant against a road he finds threatening, mainly because it brings people (i.e. the taxman) to his door, but also because of its implicit demand for movement. “When He aims for something to be always a moving, He makes it longways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, but when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up and down ways, like a tree or a man.”

For her exhibition at Bradwolff Projects, Annabel has developed a multimedia installation, which takes as its point of departure a road through the rainforest in the state of Sarawak on Borneo (East Malaysia). This logging road started on the coast and was gradually extended through to villages near the border with Indonesia where Sa'ban is spoken. Dr Beatrice Clayre began studying Sa'ban in the 1960s. In 2013 she published a trilingual Malay-Sa’ban-English picture dictionary, by which time the changes to village life brought about by the road had become tangible.  In 2016, Annabel travelled the length of the road with Dr Clayre’s son, anthropologist Alasdair Clayre, and Semion Balan and Gareth Lihan from Long Banga,  filming and interviewing people about the road, their languages and their ways of life.

They started with simple questions about how the arrival of a road affects the people living along it, and how a minority language fares under the changes a road brings. But a line through the rainforest that links communities, which used to be separated by many days travel on foot or by boat, also links into other lines that criss-cross the globe, following the long flow of capital, raw materials, and religion.

The installation is structured around strong verticals and horizontals, intermittently penetrated by single point perspective.

PRODUCERS-PARASITES-HOSTS VU

PRODUCERS-PARASITES-HOSTS VU

Sound from the installation in VU Amsterdam.
This edit was made for a busy, noisy thoroughfare.

Annabel Howland’s artistic research weaves a speculative web connecting art, science and finance. In her ongoing project Producers-Parasites-Hosts, such themes as cheating and cooperation, transparency and instability, profit and loss, intermingle with stories of microbial cooperation, dark pools and human debt. The multimedia presentation at VU during GET LOST – art route concludes this phase in her research. The installation in the central hall and corridor of VU’s main building comprises drawings and text printed on translucent film mounted on the windows, audio, photographs, plant roots and more.

Prompted by the consequences of the 2008 global financial crisis, Annabel Howland launched this research-based art project in 2012. These conversations have given rise to a multitude of forms – from paintings, diagrams, texts and publications to lectures and sound installations – presented over recent years in various contexts.

Throughout Producers-Parasites-Hosts, Howland has followed closely research by VU Professor of Mutualistic Interactions, Toby Kiers. Kiers has drawn on economics models for her research into the trade in nutrients between plants and fungi in the soil. Howland broadened this conversation by engaging with VU Professor of Finance, Albert Menkveld, around his work on flash crashes and robotic trading.

Artists and scientists explore the world at fundamental levels, driven by a deep curiosity about the substance of life and matter. The creative process of examining a subject from different angles and passing it through a range of media and artistic languages opens up new perspectives for the viewer, for imagination, and for nuanced reflection.

Clare Butcher wrote the essay to accompany the exhibition Do you read me? Really read me?

This installation was commissioned by VU Amsterdam and was generously co-funded by the Mondriaan Fund.

GET LOST – art route generates art in public space by partnering organisations in Amsterdam’s commercial district, Zuidas, with artists. For this edition the artists were invited to reflect on the idea of CODE OF CONDUCT.

GET LOST – art route 2018 received generous support from VU, AFK, Zuidas, City of Amsterdam, and the Mondriaan Fund through its programme Experimental Regulations.

For the map, audio work and the most up-to-date information on the programme, tours and performances, go to www.getlost-artroute.com

Photos by Jan Theun van Rees and Annabel Howland

HOWWORLD.COM

HOWWORLD.COM

A few screenshots from HOWWORLD.COM (Silicon Fen)

  

 

HOWWORLD.COM

HOWWORLD.COM was a work made in Flash for the web and was launched at the second iteration of the exhibition Drains, Cables, and Cuts at Ely in 2006. Drains, Cables, and Cuts was commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Norwich School of Art and Design, as part of Silicon Fen, a three-year programme of artists’ projects supported by Arts Council England East on the theme of landscape and technological innovation. This staging of Drains, Cables, and Cuts received additional support from the Mondriaan Foundation and the Fonds voor BKVB.

FEN PHOTOS

Blizzard Fen (2005) hand-printed colour photo 184cm x 230cm

Fenscope (Denver UK) (2005) framed, hand-printed, colour photo 74cm x 57cm

Fenscope(Stretham Mere) (2005) framed, hand-printed, colour photo 74cm x 57cm

Combine Cloud (2005), Woven Field (2005)

Roddons Highbridge Road (2005), Green Roddons (2005)

Roddons & Reservoir (2005), Stubble Plan (2005)

Fenstack (2005)

Thinfen and Pingos (2005)

Fen-edge and Pingos (2005)

FENS

Drains, Cables, and Cuts is a new photographic/video installation by Annabel Howland consisting of Howland’s signature cut-out images, a series of related landscape photographs and (a first for the artist a digitally animated film. (King's Lynn Arts Centre, 14 January to 25 February, 2006). The focus of the project is the landscape of the East Anglian Fenland, rendered as a complex network of lines through the lens of a camera or a series of highly tactile cartographic abstractions.From the ground, the flatness of the Fens makes everything appear in relation to a vanishing point or an ever-present horizon line. From the air, however, this unique landscape reveals itself as an intricate, evocative space of overlapping lines and contours. The paths of old watercourses visible in the soil diverge from their contemporary counterparts or converge with other features, such as physical or administrative boundaries.

For her digital animation, Howland cut out aerial photographs of the Fens so that only watercourses, clouds and the shadows of clouds remain. These fragile images were then matched to their corresponding locations on a photographed map. The map had also been extensively edited so that only numbers remain and words and names that relate to water, light or measurements: Hundred Foot Washes and Twenty Foot Drain; Bridge, Dike, Lode and Leam; Gowt and Gote and Fifties and Forty; Marsh, Mere, Moor, Cut, River, Outfall. All this was further overlaid with brightly coloured contours derived from a soil chart of the area. These composite images were then animated into a 3D ‘fly-through’ along key Fenland waterways, down adjoining cuts and creeks, beginning and ending in The Wash.

Alongside this animation are two series of photographs. One, photographed from the ground, draws our attention to the lowness of the land, the line of the horizon marking the limit of what we can see or know. Stripped of the other features of the landscape, the intersecting lines (roads, tracks, railways, waterways, boundaries) in the large cut-out photographs come to occupy and define space almost architecturally. Oscillating between object and image, these works suggest an action that continues beyond their edges.

Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and Norwich School of Art and Design, it is the latest in a series of works on the theme of landscape and technological innovation produced as part of Silicon Fen, a three-year programme of artists’ projects supported by Arts Council England East. This staging of Drains, Cables, and Cuts received additional support from the Mondriaan Foundation and the Fonds voor BKVB.