The floating Otterdam garden in the main pond of Amstelpark celebrates the return of the otter after a 50-year absence. Other iconic water animals like the moose are still missing.
In her thought-provoking book, Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing describes how we live among ghosts in late industrial landscapes – the shadows left behind when animals disappear or even become extinct.
When animals like the #moose disappear from our landscapes, we lose not only their presence but also the unique behaviours and connections they share with us. It is also a cultural loss.
The experiment:
In #GhostGardening we explore the lost world of the moose through the art of ensemble puppetry.
A small team embodied the spirit of the moose, an incredible creature that once roamed these lands and waters.
With intern Kim van der Sman, Theun first built a cartboard life-size sketch of a moose, but because Moose are water-animals the second version is waterproof.
With a small team we had a first test in Amstelpark exploring what happens when a (ghost) moose returns. Not just how people react, but more importantly how the entire environment responds to its presence, including the ducks, dogs, and all kinds of other beings in the park.
Team reflections on the experiment:
Dealing with this large body with a group of people is not easy, but you quite quickly get a feel for a moose’s gait, its rhythm and how it moves through the world, because you need to navigate it physically. You get a sense that it might actually be quite hard for a moose to be agile, maybe they can’t even go backward?
When we moved around with the moose, you just automatically find it is drawn to the leaves of trees and herbs. That just happens. It makes you wander about motivates a moose, what forces drive it to do things.
We were all in charge of different parts of the moose, which also makes you wonder about the significance of its different organs. As the back-legs you mostly just follow, as the head you seem to be the instigator.
What senses would be dominant for moose? What would a homunculus (representation of the relative importance of the senses in humans) look like for moose? When we reached the leaves, we realised it misses lips. Those are probably very important for a moose.
By walking through an environment you get an appreciation of the moose’s senses, even when we didn’t yet go into the water. That might be a great second experiment. Also since most of the birds are around the pond.
We didn’t yet encounter dogs, but the children really loved the moose. (Their first guess was cow, then horse, and then yes!! moose.)
The experiment was on the same day as a pokemon event. So there were lots of people working with ghost like presences.
Overall the experiment felt very intuitive. Even when you are not a skilled puppeteer, it can help you get a sense of the world of moose.
Otterdam, the floating garden in the main pond of the Amstelpark, attracts many beings. Watergardening brings you in close contact with a highly varied community of creatures above and below the water surface.
The world underwater is mysteriously hidden behind the reflective surface of the large pond, but working in the water you encounter this world physically. The massive carp are quite imposing, when you enter their realm it feels like they are in charge. Sholes of tiny fish drift by like nervous clouds. Dragon flies rest on the tips of the plants that float, making it a perfect vantage point for these hunters. When I tie a plant into place a tiny frog swims by, or a spider runs across the water surface, these little floating islands of vegetation are its home and with it live several kinds of caterpillars that eat the crunchy leaves of the irises.
Workshop:
Whenever I finish the work I can’t resist capturing this world, and today a small group of participants are joining me in exploring this world through video.
We have three set-ups to test:
To avoid just an instrumental interaction with this world, we first take 20min to reflect on our relationship with water. Since participants are from a wide range of backgrounds this gives us a rich tapestry of histories, relations, impressions, and it is nice to share how this submerged world speaks to each of us.
Each participant chooses a set-up to test and we spend an hour and a half testing various methods and locations.
The Wolfgang action camera feels solid, but has a fish-eye lens. The smartphone has way more advanced image software, which makes its footage look more colorful and adjusts better to darkness and brightness. The endoscope can reach into tiny places and it has a light, but its image quality is much lower than the other two.
So each tool has advantages and drawbacks, personally I prefer the smartphone option, because you have that with you anyway, and this kind of underwater pouch works really quite well; the images remain clear and touchscreen still works.
I’ve been looking forward to todays workshop, because the group looks exiting. Otherwise is a group of Wageningen University students exploring themes beyond regular academic curricula. Otherwise explore other directions and the overcoming of a single realism; instead fostering an openness to different ways of living and experiencing. By organizing events small and big their aim is to create a space where to imagine other lives and ways of being.
Such student groups have a long history at Wageningen. I have close friendships and collaborations with people who were part of such networks at Wageningen reaching many decades back. People who have been at the forefront of ecological practices. So I’m excited to meet this young generation.
We meet at Zone2Source’s Rietveldhuis in Amstelpark on a cold winter Saturday morning. After a general getting-to-know-each-other, I start the workshop by introducing some of my work also beyond Otterdam. Including a small underwater device (see image above) that can play the sound of whale’s voices. Especially the Harbour Porpoise (Bruinvis), which is the most numerous whale in our waters. We each try the device, by holding it against our foreheads; porpoises make their vocalizations with an organ in their foreheads we don’t have, weirdly called the melon.
I used this device in the Westerschelde to feel what that voice feels like under water. It was a stunning experience. Underwater hearing and feeling (tactile) is much closer related than above water. It made a deep impact on me to feel just how overwhelming the experience of human noise must be to these whales. It is so physical under water.
Otterdam is a structure, a floating garden with rare and indigenous waterplants, but more importantly it is a practice. Somehow the Dutch with our rich history in dealing with water, have no real history in wetland or floating gardens, unlike south American, Asian and other cultures worldwide. By watergardening we enter the realm of the otter, and might learn something from the experience. Fundamentally the aim of Otterdam is not to change the landscape, but to change ourselves. The animal as a guide to more pluriversal ways of being.
I’ve brought a deck of cards and we each pick one. Bear, Spider, Skunk, Dragonfly, Mouse and Owl. (The deck of cards is Turtle Island oriented, with a book that shares indigenous perspectives of the medicine these animals embody). We talk about these animals, their wisdom and their appearance in dreams. The workshop question is: what kind of garden does your animal inspire in you? We each take a small card and sketch/write for about 20min.
The results are simply stunning.
This Chilean student has picked the bear card. In Chilean culture bear is associated with many qualities. This bear garden is seasonal. A summer and winter garden that fits the bears rhythms. In summer many plants grow that are part of bear diets. In winter there is a central area in the garden, a burrow, for the bear (us) to retreat into; “to go to the darkness, to the parts of yourself you don’t see often.” This can be scary, so this garden is a protective space, with herbs inside the burrow, including the Chilean Boldo herb, which is used when rage is making you sick, to let go of rage.
Spirals are central to this garden, spirals interconnecting everything, like the spirals seen in permaculture. The spider is seen as a being that gathers, and also gathers stories. A main strength of the spider is its way of persistence, if the web is broken, it rebuilds it. Fail and try again. Its web enables it to collect. Catching things, allowing them to fall like dewdrops onto the soil is an important cycle in this garden. The spider garden is a deeply interconnected and cyclical garden.
This student is from the US and has seen skunks often. They are curious, inquisitive creatures always rooting for things. Fall must be such a gratifying season for skunks, with all the leaves to rummage through, searching for small treasures. The Skunk garden aims to be a space where humans and skunks can cohabit, with skunk and person hiding places. Creating the opportunity for distance between them when needed. This is a garden where humans and skunks can be comfortable with each other.
This garden is inspired broadly by dragonfly qualities. Perhaps more dragonfly energy and like its glistening rainbow wings, evoking worlds beyond. Seeing everything as an illusion, how do you build something within that? This may need a stony, rocky environment that cools and from which new realities can spark.
Mice are so alert to the world. This Chilean student feels really akin to them and describes a garden populated with bamboo like plants native to Chile. Plants that are the first to grow after fires have come. They create moist climates that help forests to regrow. Many mice are there. The mouse garden is a restoration garden. The mice eat the fruits, spreading the seeds of native plants.
The owl is active at night. This night garden is populated with trees but relatively open, for the owl to fly through. It has lots of dense groundcover for its prey to thrive in. Climbers include night-fragrant species like Kamperfoeli that attract night-butterflies. This is a garden to be seen in the light of the moon. With subtle greys, oranges and purples. The garden reminds us that many forms of life are nocturnal, the species humans may be less aware of. It is a garden linked with the moon and with dreaming.
I wasn’t sure this drawing exercise would work, but it was soo amazing to see the poetic ideas that came out. Really stretching beyond our human focus and resulting in gardens with wonderful thematic depth. This was one of my favourit workshops I’ve hosted. Thank you to all participants for an inspiring get-together.
Theun
Menselijke parkbezoekers kennen het park vooral vanaf het droge. Misschien hebben nog weinig mensen het park onderwater gezien. Deze beelden geven een indruk van het perspectief van otters, vissen, water-insecten, en andere aquatische dieren. En laat zien hoe Otterdam er uit ziet voor hen (die ogen hebben).
When the otter came back to our city in winter of 2021, I was quite exited. It seemed like a messenger at a time of extreme drought.
Around that time I was watching ‘The Mandalorian’, a Star Wars series, and in it many planets are visited. As a spaceship tore through the clouds of a distant planet called Sorgan, piloted by the Mandalorian, the audience of this Star Wars tv-show was treated to an impressive feat of worldbuilding.
(Planet Sorgan drawing by Theun)
Immediately striking was the bioregional approach through which this world was envisioned; materials, structures, activities, cultural expressions all were directly derived from intimate connections to a swampy, forested biome. It looked as if the design team had taken the swamp and created an entire swamp culture, including means of living for all kinds of creatures, including people, frogs, fish, algue, shrimp and swamp-robots. This – I thought – is ‘otter-world’, in the sense that the otter seemed like it’s totem animal.
Planet Sorgan appeared here – in a way- as an alternate Netherlands, a reimagined Amsterdam, as a total overhaul of what a contemporary human settlement in a wetland-area might look like. This connected in my mind directly to the return of the otter to our city and eventually resulted in otterdam as a floating garden, not a structure made for otters, but a practice inspired by these iconic waterbeings and their kinship relations. To live in a more active relationship with the waters of Amsterdam. Can’t wait to start on a swamp robot!
Locaties
Het Glazen Huis (tentoonstellingen)
Rietveld Paviljoen (kantoor)
Orangerie (Park Studio)
vrijdag–zondag, 13–17u en op afspraak,
buitenwerken zijn dagelijks toegankelijk
Amstelpark 4
1083 HZ Amsterdam
info@zone2source.net
