Correspondence between Kim & Pim

Dear Kim

We agreed to start a correspondence to map out the work process and as a kind of dramaturgical reflection. I am now writing you this first letter after spending two and a half weeks in Bruges doing research.

During those few weeks, the concept of 'time' was central to me. I took many walks through and around Bruges, and it struck me time and again that the city pushes everything to the periphery. The city centre of Bruges is, of course, one large open-air museum that only refers back to a specific period of the Middle Ages. It seems as if all the layers of time before and after that period have been erased, or hidden from view as much as possible. In some streets, you really feel like you've landed in the Middle Ages, as if Bruges has a kind of historical tunnel vision. After a few days, this felt quite claustrophobic and I felt the need to see where this fiction ended.

When I undertook my first long trip to the outskirts of Bruges, I walked down the canal towards Nieuwege. The experience of following a straight line allowed me to clearly see where the frayed edges of the city began to show. Bruges has a fairly strict invisible line beyond which the neatness disappears. When I walked down the Houtkaai and under the N9, rubbish was already starting to appear at the side of the road. The initially neat lawns turned into loose tufts of grass and there were already some holes in the road. The houses no longer looked as if they had been built in the 12th century and were all a little worse maintained. I was relieved that the city's attention was waning. Yet everything was 'man-made'. I had expected to walk into nature, so I went in search of woods. A little further on, I found the Waggelwaterbos, and although it looked like a piece of wilderness, it turned out to be just a neglected piece of building land on which things had started to grow in the 1970s. The contrast between city and nature does not really apply here. Man has had a hand in everything, even if it was not always done with care.

The animal species I am researching here is the wild horse. All the horses we know today are descended from it, but they are all domesticated animals. About 10,000 years ago, humans decided to take the horse into their homes, and since then the wild variety has slowly died out. Humans have had a hand in that too. On the one hand, by keeping it as a domesticated animal, and on the other, by hunting wild horses.

American futurologist Stewart Brand developed the concept of 'the long now'. On the Earth's timescale, we live in a much longer now than the few days, weeks or years we currently refer to. For Brand, the present is the last 10,000 years and the next 10,000 years combined. From the last ice age to the next. From this perspective, the entire history of humankind is part of the present, and therefore there is no past or future. As I walk through the Waggelwaterbos, I wonder how I can experience this long now. If almost every piece of land here has been cultivated by humans over the past 10,000 years, then it is not possible to experience 'nature' as such. Because then I would be walking around in that forest in a kind of fiction, a fiction that is not much different from the city centre of Bruges. So how can I experience the past 10,000 years as if I were still in the middle of them, instead of considering them a time far behind me? As I walk through the Waggelwaterbos, a bench appears where I can think about this question some more. All around me are oak trees, frogspawn and tall grass.

I hope to find a small answer to this question with this project.
Lots of love,
Pim

***

Hi Pim,

How funny that you're in Bruges. Have you ever seen the film 'In Bruges'? With Colin Farrell? In that film, he says: "Bruges is a shithole". His character had the same claustrophobic feeling as you. Later, he apologised to the people of Bruges for that statement. Although that line was just in the script.

My grandfather is from Bruges. So my ancestors are from there. I don't know what that means. A few years ago, the mayor of Bruges announced that poverty in Bruges had been eradicated. What he meant was that he had raised rents so high that anyone living below a certain standard of living could no longer afford to live in the city, and poverty had thus been 'successfully' pushed to the outskirts and out of the mayor's sight.

He is probably the kind of person who thinks that if you look away convincingly enough, the problems will actually disappear. However, I think that toddlers grow out of this around the age of 4. But just as some adults never grow out of the anal phase, Bruges' policy may never have outgrown the peek-a-boo phase. Or perhaps it suffers from psolistic tendencies: convinced of the idea that George Berkeley's tree makes no sound in that deserted forest. Although that is a poor interpretation of that theory. I hope you understand the point I am trying to make here.

Didn't you make it to Damme? Damme, Sijsele and all those villages between Bruges and Eeklo have quite a lot of nature. Although most of that nature is also subject to agriculture. Perhaps you don't call that nature. In Belgium, you have to try very hard to find nature that has not been touched by human hands. Do you still have that in the Netherlands? I think Boekhoute, Bassevelde and the polders of Assenede still have the largest areas of nature. And in the Flemish Ardennes, there are also still areas that resemble nature.

Do you remember in our Architecture classes that Bruges and Ghent were compared as case studies? Ghent was the city where architecture was used as something dynamic and eclecticism was allowed in its building plans, while Bruges was mainly concerned with preservation and was more rigid in its urban development plans. Indeed, the words 'city as a dead museum' were also used at the time. I don't think there are many people living in Bruges anymore, but I'm not entirely sure.

I cannot imagine that wild horses ever lived here. Flanders seems moderate in every way. Even when it storms, it is a small storm that is insignificant – if it breaks through at all – and when it rains, it is usually drizzle. There is nothing wild about Flanders. Or at least not that I can see.

Bob Van Reeth also said that the most characteristic feature of Belgium is the back houses that you can see from the train. I think there are also footpaths between those houses and the railway track.

I come from a very small village not far from Bruges, called Boekhoute, and back then the farmer still delivered the milk in those cans – metal cans – on a cart pulled by two farm horses. Once he brought me a giant tiger. A kind of cuddly toy, you know? But bigger than me. My mother wouldn't let me have the tiger and I mourned it for at least three days. I really wanted a wild tiger.

I have no idea how you can find traces of the past in a fictional medieval village. Have you ever read Agamben? He once wrote that every revolution that has taken place in the past was preceded by a paradigm shift in the concept of time. Not necessarily only theoretically, I think, but also emotionally. So before a revolution can actually break through, there must be a moment preceding it in which time is experienced radically differently than before. Perhaps your focus on time means you are intuitively on the right track?

Best wishes!
Kim

***

Hi Kim,

It's been a while since I last wrote to you, quite a while actually. I've tried to write a few times, but something always came up. But now I'm finally getting around to it.

Last time, I wrote to you about the role time plays in my research. That role has only become more important, but in this letter I would like to share some side thoughts about space with you. The research I am conducting compares different spaces and attempts to present a different view of space.

For example, I ask you to sit down on a bench in the city and imagine the human presence out of the view you have from there. That is impossible, of course, because what would you think then? Literally everything you see in a city has been conceived and put there by someone – even the grass and the trees. So you can't really extrapolate and say, for example, 'Oh, then this is a forest'. Because who planted the trees there? And are those trees native, or do they actually come from other parts of the world? For me, the question is primarily an invitation to think beyond the established.

In his book 'The City', Richard Sennett beautifully describes what a mental prison a city has become. In the past, there was an expression in German: 'Stadtluft macht frei'. If you ignore the unfortunate connotation with Auschwitz, it is mainly an expression that says a lot about the city at the end of the 19th century. It was a place where you could be whoever you wanted to be, a place where changeability and expression were important. He gives the example of an Italian goldsmith who took on different guises for different clients. To one he was a poet, to another a mercenary. The city gave him the freedom to be a chameleon. When Sennett told this anecdote to his students in Japan, they translated the expression as 'wearing different hats'. Sennett draws from this the wisdom that where life is open, it also becomes multi-layered.

Openness and presence are also two concepts that I consciously incorporate into the creative process. For me, it is not so much about the open city, but about opening up the environment. We certainly lock the city down for ourselves as city dwellers, with the introduction of more and more rules and surveillance cameras, city guards and sometimes even the army, but even more so we make it uninhabitable for other species. I feel as if, in urban planning and design, we don't think at all about what it means for other animals to live in such a concrete and stone environment. And if we do, it is never a decisive criterion, but rather solution-oriented. A green viaduct, for example, is a very good example of this. We should wear many more different hats in the design of our environment and consider what a city would look like through the eyes of a fish, a frog, a dog or a horse, even before we build the environment. The city should be conceived as a post-humanistic biotope, in which we are only one of its inhabitants. Until then, I fear that we will only make the environment of other species smaller by declaring the human experience to be superior.

The audio walk is best experienced with noise-cancelling headphones, which filter out all background noise and create a kind of empty space in your head. You literally hear nothing. It is a space that is there and yet is not there. The voice that speaks to you has no name or face; it is a bit like the voices Beckett uses in his later work. In an empty space, there is only speech. I alternate this auditory space with a booklet that you should use as a guide. The space of the page is another environment that you experience. I see the booklet as a sketchbook, because I feel that this fits in very well with the content of the walk. Nothing is ever finished, everything is changeable and we are only passing through. In that sense, a signpost is also not finished, but may need to be adjusted tomorrow because a street has been rerouted or a house demolished. I also talk about an extinct species, and species in evolution are actually always sketches that lead to subsequent sketches without there being an end point to which those sketches should lead. Talking about 'the horse' is therefore somewhat misleading, because when does one of the species that precede the horse become a horse? These taxonomic classifications are never hard lines, but always fluid transitions.

The environment you traverse is, of course, the third space at play. During the walk, it functions as a kind of projection screen onto which you, as a spectator, project your own world. Sometimes the environment cooperates with your imagination, sometimes it works against it. That rebelliousness makes it interesting. If the work is successful, you are, like Marco Polo in Calvino's 'Invisible Cities', creating your own city in your imagination, or even further back, your own tundra steppe. Perhaps the walk can give you that idea at times, that there are several cities at that moment, one of concrete and stone and one that only exists because you are imagining it at that moment.

So much for my digressive thoughts.

I look forward to your reply.

Best regards!
Pim

How do we deal with the mass extinction of other organisms in our time? For PLAN B/Veldwerk, Pim Cornelussen conducts research into ecological memory loss with Een soort van Stilte (A Kind of Silence). An exercise in cross-species empathy, a search for how we can feel what we have lost. In the form of a walk, you, as a spectator, step into the shoes of an extinct (or endangered) species.