Detach/adjust/connect texts
The Number 720 Bus
By Alan Quireyns
From the publication Residenzen 2015, published by Kulturamt Frankfurt am Main
Whenever I'm asked what makes organizing a residency for visual artists so exciting, my invariable response is to point to how closely involved you become in the residents' daily life. It's not only a matter of the finished work or the production of it — even the most ordinary things like finding a supermarket or a cinema all have their part to play. A connection like this gives you an idea of how residents deal with everyday reality, the decisions they make and the place their artistic practice has in it. To be honest, most artists regard their practice as the be-all and end-all, and it's the everyday worries and concerns that are brushed aside. A residency means temporarily starting again and devising an environment in which the work can thrive. It's an impermanent dislocation that creates distance. The change of place and the unconditioned time also generate space, space used for reflection, inspiration, experimentation and production.
Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen uses this space to further the development of his *Detach/Adjust/connect* and to experiment with it in an entirely different context. Only a day after his arrival in the residency he boards the number 720 bus, which runs to Putte-Kappelle. It is not the city that beckons him but the Mediterranean pine. His quest for the tree brings him to the Kalmthout Heath nature reserve, which straddles the border between Belgium and the Netherlands, three quarters of an hour north of Antwerp. Sixteen times he takes the bus to search this huge protected area, ranging over the heath for up to ten hours at a stretch. On one of these trips he crosses the Belgian-Dutch border thirty-seven times. It is not easy to find what he's looking for: a more or less straight tree with a maximum circumference of 36 centimetres, which is also the greatest length his saw can cut.
When Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen started this project (while he was studying at the Städel Academy in Frankfurt am Main), he relied on a tape measure. Now he's able to gauge the distance by eye. Having found the perfect tree he tries to cut it down. He has various tools for this. If there's no one around and he can work fairly freely he uses a simple axe. But if the tree is closer to one of the marked paths and he wants to avoid too much attention, he'll switch to the pruning saw. If it's necessary to work without a sound he'll use a Japanese saw, but that extends the duration of the action by quite a while.
Having felled his tree, Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen is faced with a new challenge — how to get it out of the nature reserve and convey it by bus and bicycle to the residence. He wraps the trunk — which can be anything from 1.60 to 2 metres in length — in heavy-duty black plastic sheeting, so creating a mysterious shiny black package that attracts silent stares from the people he passes. No one says anything, but he sees them making all kinds of strange associations. For a foreigner, especially for an artist in a foreign country, it takes very little to be incongruous. After several trips to the heath Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen becomes more or less immune to this wordless appraisal, except when he is waiting for the bus. This kind of passive scrutiny feeds his anxiety. The covert yet insistent glances of his fellow bus passengers contain an unspoken question. He tries to discover the nature of this question by staring back, but as soon as their looks cross they flutter apart like startled birds.
Twelve trees make it to the residence unharmed. With the help of a friendly furniture-maker, Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen saws the tree trunks into planks. He mixes the sawdust with resin and charcoal. This results in a tarry black goo which he uses to glue the planks together again till they once more form a trunk, only this time layered with thick films of adhesive. He keeps them in the basement till the glue hardens, then finally carries them upstairs to the exhibition room, where he installs them in a long row, leaning upright, backs to the wall. Without using any other material than that provided by the trees themselves, Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen has created a series of objects. In spite of their rough stature they still persuade our senses that what we're seeing are tree trunks, although a transformation has taken place. They have turned into vessels containing the traces of all his actions. What all this adds up to is a Sisyphean labour, a search for the boundary where form and meaning become almost entirely dissevered. *Detach/Adjust/connect* is an attempt to take a step back in time; a tangible demonstration of the desire to restore something that has been irreversibly disturbed. The imagination of the viewers holds both threat and security. It motivated coincidental passers-by on the heath and the bus to picture the content of the package as something that was not there. Yet in the final stage of the project, it is that same imagination that has the power to restore the tree's integrity.
Invasive Species
By Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen
The Mediterranean pine dominates the landscape of the Zoom-Kalmthoutse heath north of Antwerp, situated in the borderlands between Belgium and Holland.
Upon its introduction some 150 years ago it quickly overtook the ecosystem, drying up the forest floor in its wake. Thriving but not inherent. Producing great amounts of material, with no eye for integration.
It was an impressive act, a symbol of surplus and an illustration of wealth, this physical movement of the exotic tree from the south of Europe to the flat lands of *Vlaanderen*. Only far later would the realization come that, in spite of the great profit of lumber, hunting possibilities decreased drastically and the danger of forest fires increased.
And what does one do when the species you introduced goes on to disrupt its surroundings so significantly?
You introduce another one!
The Rhododendron does not care that the Pinus Nigra stole all the sunlight with its dense canopies. It is not bothered by the fact that the powerful tree roots suck the top five meters of soil dry. It shoots tap roots even further down to find moisture and nourishment.
The intention of this introduction was multiple-edged: to rehydrate the forest floor, for the sake of colorful flowers, to break a certain aesthetic monopoly, to signal progression and change.
The Rhododendron bushes in turn grew opaque and left the square pieces of land between the paths practically impenetrable. So the mono-cultural forrest became a duo-cultural one. The life within can now only be viewed from a distance. One could imagine that the undergrowth would host smaller and more agile animals than human beings, but it is not the case. There is little food and there is little water.
In spite of this, if you, by violent physical acts, do penetrate the seemingly impenetrable, you occasionally find a little glade hosting a holly tree. It grows slowly but surely. It is not a social being and does not allow others of its own kind to thrive next to it. The one that gets a foothold suffocates its kinsmen and creates a space of its own in no uncertain terms.
The holly tree is invasive in a culture of invasive species.
And when it is cut down, when it bleeds its sap onto the vegetable mold, the Rhododendron or the Mediterranean pine opportunistically assume control of the area.
Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen
By Marina Rüdiger
From the publication of the 13th Fellbach Small Sculpture Triennial — Food — Ecologies of the Everyday (2016)
Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen
b. 1982 in Brovst, Denmark
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany
Detach/adjust/connect, 2014–2015
Rasmus Søndergaard Johannsen works conceptually with the idea of nature and its immanent processes. He breaks completely with romanticized notions that view 'Nature' with reverence and as something sublime. He explores instead the laws of its cycles and adapts its production processes in the way man did centuries ago. He uses traditional technologies and follows clearly structured work cycles, developing them for his own usually dysfunctional purposes that are schematized as conceptual instructions for action.
Søndergaard Johannsen's work *Detach/adjust/connect* literally enacts the instructions of its title. His materials are parts of trees — birch, pine, ilex — gathered by the artist in places significant in his personal and professional development. The fragments on view in Fellbach derive from trees in the Frankfurt area, where Søndergaard Johannsen studied, as well as the Dutch-Belgian border region, where he was an artist-in-residence. The trees in his works are mainly invasive species that are commonly met with at their sites of origin. The Mediterranean pine, for instance, was introduced to heathland some 150 years ago to aesthetically upgrade mixed stands and boost the timber yield. But the pines desiccated the woodland floor, making it impossible for other species to survive. While ilex can hold out against the invasive pine, birch suffers from it. Søndergaard Johannsen selected his tree trunks according to practical principles such as upright growth and the minimum width necessary for a circular saw. A rationalized series of steps ensues. Before the trees are felled and lopped they are first deresinated. The artist himself then transports the parts of the trees from the wood to the workshop, where they are sawn into centimetres-thick longitudinal strips. Søndergaard Johannsen collects the sawdust and waste wood produced and incinerates them. The ash is then mixed with the resin of its respective tree, following a traditional formula, to produce a tar-like adhesive. This is then used to reassemble the strips into a tree trunk-like whole. The rationalized cycle of senseless actions returns to its starting point.
One thinks of an act of reparation: Søndergaard Johannsen fells the trees, saws and reassembles them in order to put them to a new use in the exhibition context. Here the arboreal species no longer harm each other, rather they open up a broad discursive context. By appropriating the trees Søndergaard Johannsen not only thematizes the abovementioned situation of native mixed-stand forests, he also speaks of civilization, power and the exotic: man exploits nature to make its products subservient to his ends. The use of wood for building houses, furniture and ships is part of this. At the same time trees, themselves symbols of fixity and relation to place, are relocated to foreign sites to serve man not just practically but also aesthetically. They tell a mute tale of exotic, distant lands, and introduce visual variety into native woods. The price is paid by nature being thrown off balance. But ultimately it is man who must bear the consequences of drought, forest fires and dieback.
MR
The Anirahuas
By James Zaragoza-De-Vries
From Städelschule Graduates 2014, MMK, Frankfurt am Main
The Anirahuas
From all the many tribes that Álvarez had lived with, he understood the existence of The Anirahuas. He assumed them to be a kind of mythological totemic clan.
'They are believed to have been grown in the form of trees' writes Álvarez 'somewhere, along Rio Camisea, Rio Timpia and Rio Ticumpinia.'¹ What became the keystone of his work, was found in the hands of a man dubbed *Prochaska*, who was trying to make a living by selling scraps of used paper in Huancayo, and was taken from him for just few *nuevos soles*.
Álvarez struck a bargain over what he recognized to be more than neutral paper. For it has been produced in the same way certain insects elaborate their food: "It was made of chewed wood, silt, resin; it seemed to have been pressed, then left cooking under the sun."² The authentic piece of writing is a sort of testament *Álvarez* bought while returning from one of the most remote regions of the Peruvian Amazonia. The document might be the first demonstration of the existence of the Anirahuas — the lost tribe.
The testament was written in a letter form by a missionary, Juan Cabot-Fields.³ From what can be inferred, the Anirahuas were turned into slaves by Cabot-Fields, and forced to stop their nomadic way of life. The missionary taught them new ways of organizing society with the promise of liberating them from their human condition. Liberation did arrive, taking form of a disease: "a fatal spirit entered the camp. It spread rapidly and many died in agony."⁴
The epidemic was believed to be manifestation of a demonic possession. Despite many attempts to heal it through rituals of purification, most people died. No official statement has been made as to how the disease entered the camp. However, "[...] The first deaths were of men who worked around the river, loading and unloading wood logs."⁵
The fight to the disease is narrated in myths and chants of other uncontacted tribes, particularly the ones of the natives that settled in the same area e.g. the Nanti tribe. By comparison of Álvarez's interpretation of the ritual chants and the description given by Cabot-Fields in his testament, it can be inferred that the epidemic was not plague. Álvarez suggests the hypothesis of three other possible diseases that might have caused the death of the whole Anirahua population.
Here it is how the epidemic is mentioned in the ritual chant 'Coh-alori':
> Coh-alori o lori
> Lori --no
> Loei --no⁶
1. Amor Dominique-Álvarez, On Anirahuas Manifestations in Amazonian Indigenous Stories and Ritual Chants, from: Missionary life. Vol. 3, 1977, p. 133
2. Ibid.
3. He is believed to be relative of the better known Thomas Fields, missionary of Irish origin.
4. From the original testament of Juan Cabot-Fields, undated.
5. Ibid.
6. 'Coh-' means, literally, Spirits-of-the-river. Spirits-of-the-river that constricted voices in feeling of restlessness / moans filling the void / a loud-snap-like-wood-splintering filled the void [From: Amor Dominique-Álvarez, On Anirahuas Manifestations in Amazonian Indigenous Stories and Ritual Chants, from: Missionary life. Vol. 3, 1977, p. 141]