'Brook and brooklet haste below': Elise Eeraerts & Roberto Aparicio Ronda at WUNDERKAMMER - NATURALIA I ARTIFICIALIA
EN
“Swamps, moors and wetlands: in both historical and contemporary stories, they are often the symbolic setting for sinister events; a place of mischief and mystery. For instance, the ghost lights created by the slow ignition of swamp gasses often fulfills the role of spirits in sagas and myths because of its mysterious form. Or think of the macabre phenomenon of bog corpses being mummified by the preservative effect of the peat soil. At the same time, wetlands are associated not only with death, but above all with life. They harbor a very diverse ecosystem that plays an important role in the context of climate change as carbon sinks and storm buffers.”
– extract form the exhibition text by Karen Verschooren
Since 2012, Elise Eeraerts & Roberto Aparicio Ronda have been developing a multidisciplinary practice focusing mainly on the relationship between art and architecture. Their projects substantialize in natural settings or urban public space, where site-specificity, history and material transformations are the subject of their research.
As the most primitive material, earth occupies an important central role within their practice: from explorations of land and excavations therein, to the appropriation of various types of soil and its processing into objects and spatial installations. In their recent work, Eeraerts and Aparicio Ronda examine the role of land and landscape from a climate science perspective. In a thought-provoking, often visceral way, they allow current conventions from the anthropocene to collide with ideas and traditions whereby humans have and continue to appropriate nature.
