January - May 2024, Rotterdam
A Neo-Holocene collection to create the Post human-beaver species.
Beaver punk captures the centuries-old inter-species relationship between humans and beavers, the bond is cultural, social, psychological, political and historical. From archaeological material findings out the Holocene to the increasing pressure from the current digging activities by the beaver on dykes, railway infrastructure and other human-made structures. In the south of the Netherlands the beaver is already seen as a threat and can be killed with special permission from the local authorities. The Beaver's habitat is growing rapidly as is the resistance from the local inhabitants.
“Interspecies association is only possible through interspecies metamorphosis” (Coccia, 2021, p. 150)
In 1826, the last indigenous beaver (Castor Fiber) of the Netherlands was killed (Thissen and Dijkstra, 2018, p. 6). The beaver was for centuries hunted for its fur, meat, and Castoreum, which was a yellowish exudate from its anal glands. It was used as a resinoid in various types of perfumes (Musees de Grasse, 2007). The beaver was reintroduced in 1988 to rewild and thereby recover the nature. Rewilding is the process whereby human interventions are reduced and with the goal to restore the ecosystems (Holmes et al., 2020). The rewild program in the Netherlands is not reduced by human activity but rather it is a place of recreation, constructed and highly controlled, this way of controlling is causing more damage to the natural environment than what they are intending (Cronon, 1995, p. 5; Oudman, 2022b). In a country as densely populated as the Netherlands, humans and non-humans quickly intersect, we unlearned how to coexist. The humans in the culture landscape are in my opinion not ready for rewilding, we humans must rewild first and return to being animal, to ecological thought of existence and coexistence (Morton, 2010, p. 4), after that we can preserve nature and restore the ecosystems.
What is wild? A wild environment is never wild it is designed, built and invented by humans, and occupied by other species that have no control over it (Coccia, 2021, p. 153). The wilderness had to be subdued, produced according to the capitalist/ colonial standard (Heemstra, 2024). The division made between wild and civilised is a cultural construction from humans. Humans are not divided by this construction; we are integral part of the wilderness (Oudman, 2022a).
Who and what is human? ”What makes the human human is not inside the body or brain, or even inside the collective social body, but in our interdependency with artifacts.”(Colomina and Wigley, 2016, p. 23)
.Beaver punk consists of a collection of artifacts, each masking a part of this complex inter-species relationship. The artifacts are a modus operandi to rewild and fantasize about the return of the historic coexistence with the beaver from the Holocene. It was an era in which half of the Netherlands was constrained by the tides, the sea level was rising from the melting of the glacier from the Weichselian glaciation (the Last Ice Age), and the wetlands were the most common landscape type. The collection reimagines and recreates a Neo-Holocene inhabited by the post-human-beaver species
References:
Coccia, E. (2021) Metamorphoses. Translated by R. Mackay. Cambridge, UK Medford, MA, USA: Polity Press.
Colomina, B. and Wigley, M. (2016) Are we human? notes on an archaeology of design. Istanbul Tasarım Bienali, Zürich, Switzerland: Lars Mul̈ler Publishers.
Cronon, W. (1995) ‘The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature’, in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., pp. 69–90. Available at: https://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html (Accessed: 19 April 2024).
Heemstra, M. van (2024) ‘De kolonist van de 21ste eeuw draagt een ruimtepak’, De Correspondent. Available at: https://decorrespondent.nl/15251/de-kolonist-van-de-21ste-eeuw-draagt-een-ruimtepak/61f57825-264c-0200-3f9b-8863381f92b2 (Accessed: 24 April 2024).
Holmes, G. et al. (2020) ‘What is Rewilding, How Should it be Done, and Why? A Q-method Study of the Views Held by European Rewilding Advocates’, Conservation and Society, 18(2), p. 77. doi: 10.4103/cs.cs_19_14.
Morton, T. (2010) The ecological thought. Cambridge (Mass.) London: Harvard University Press.
Musees de Grasse (2007) Musees de Grasse. Available at: https://archive.ph/5MUbm (Accessed: 22 March 2024).
Oudman, T. (2022a) ‘Natuurbescherming is een kwestie van geloof’, De Correspondent. Available at: https://decorrespondent.nl/13450/natuurbescherming-is-een-kwestie-van-geloof/801f4a49-61a6-0836-38e8-70e5676aca94 (Accessed: 24 April 2024).
Oudman, T. (2022b) ‘Nederland beschermt de natuur kapot’, De Correspondent. Available at: https://decorrespondent.nl/13244/nederland-beschermt-de-natuur-kapot/7b883136-054e-0d64-0940-42696827dc8d (Accessed: 2 April 2024).
Thissen, J. and Dijkstra, V. (2018) ‘Werkwijze bever bij RWS’, Zoogdiervereniging. Available at: https://www.zoogdiervereniging.nl/sites/default/files/2019-10/2017.50%20%20RWS%20Werkwijze%20Bever%20def_0.pdf (Accessed: 22 March 2024).