Zeger Reyers – Undergrowth (2017)

Without the crosses, they would maybe go unnoticed. For Disruption, Zeger Reyers (b. Voorburg, 1966, lives and works in The Hague) placed a large number of small spruce trees on wooden crosses, just like Christmas trees, among a plot of much taller spruces in De Oude Warande. The crosses were bright white, so the viewer immediately saw both the trees and the geometric grid in which they were arranged.

At the same time, visitors noticed that the original spruces were also standing close together in perfectly straight lines. Although the park has never had a commercial function, this piece of land looked like an area of forest that was waiting to be cleared. Due to a lack of space and light, not all of the spruces could grow to maturity and the weaker trees died prematurely. This is why, at Christmas tree nurseries, the smallest ones are always cut down. It allows the rest to grow as they should. If people do not intervene to thin out forests, nature does it instead. At De Oude Warande, dead trees leaned at angles among the living ones.

With Undergrowth, Reyers was making a reference to human destruction of the earth but also to the natural survival of the fittest, which is, in fact, no different in our individualistic human world. In the light of theories about the Anthropocene age, which posit a constructed reality in which humans and earth mutually influence each other, the distinction between trees dying naturally or through human interaction is effectively irrelevant.

The interaction between different environments, with and without direct human intervention, is the foundation of the practice of Zeger Reyers. He first became well known for installations in which he grew fungi and mould on objects, immersing chairs in the Eastern Scheldt, for example, so that they became covered with mussels, which the public could eat. In his installations, he contrasts the natural world and the artificial world. Humans attempt to control nature as far as possible, but nature is incredibly powerful and self-regulating. This makes viewers of his work aware of the vulnerability of the world that they create themselves.