Catalogue > At random

For some years Wood Wide Web is the magic phrase to describe the web of roots, fungi and bacteria helping to connect trees and plants to one another. In ‘What Wide Web?’ Van Bakel depicts the surreal wasteland of Rotterdam Maasvlakte and its forest of pylons. After a bumpy ride we zoom in on the improbable beauty germinating underneath high voltage lines, a living part of our world hardly ever noticed. The plants that grow below the energy-web are shown as in a digital herbarium. We can ask ourselves: are industry and nature evolving more into co-existence? Background info: Location: Rotterdam harbour, Beerweg Maasvlakte, a place that used to be a nature reserve called ‘de Beer’. Sound: Contact mics on humming power-pylons. Geophones in the earth on the spot that record the sound of falling raindrops. Camera: Animation of still photographs made with home-built scannercamera. Instead of bringing plants to a picture-scanner in his studio, the artist dragged the scanner on site over soil and green. “A forest ecology is a delicate one. If the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Atshean word for world is also the word for forest.” Ursula K. Le Guin from The Word for World is Forest.

Michiel van Bakel studied astronomy, film/photography (Psychopolis; Frans Zwartjes) and psychology for several years before he chose for fine art, at art school. Van Bakel expresses himself artistically in film and videos, sculpture and installations. His work focuses on people and their surroundings, often resulting in a poetic reality. It conveys a fascination for the tension between humans and technology, and the perception of time in our disrupted ecosystems. Van Bakel lives and works in Rotterdam.