Tree jacking

Letters from Kim Snauwaert * 

Friday, 21 August 2020

At 6 p.m., I arrived in Beerlegem, at the forest where Max works against the weight of his tree. The sun was slowly setting and many rays were entering the forest, bringing peace. I was wearing quite a fancy dress because I was going out for dinner with friends afterwards. My dress seemed a bit absurd in the forest. Max was jacking up his tree. I don't know much about jacks. Maybe it was the kind of jack you use to replace a truck wheel. In any case, it was a red jack and the sunbeams accentuated its red colour. I took a photo of it.

An empty forest, a small, quiet valley with only the sound of Max and the squeaking steel springs of the jack, back and forth, pulling the lever with his full weight, and everything seemed very dance-like – especially with those rays on top. It was slowly getting dark and every picture I took of Max was blurred because he was moving faster than my camera could keep up. I decided to happily accept this minor technical flaw.

Once the tree had been jacked up a bit, Max went back upstairs — because his tree is in a bit of a valley, as I mentioned earlier — and there was a cart with wood. He took some pieces downstairs, along with a hand saw. Next to his jack, he sawed the pieces of wood and placed them in a small pile under the tree so that the tree could lean on the wood. I asked Max what he would do once the tree was completely off the ground. He replied that he would put carts underneath it to make the tree more mobile. Max laughed briefly at how inefficiently he was doing everything, but I thought the extra work that resulted from that inefficiency was quite essential. I would like to write more about that. About the importance of inefficiency. Or what is defined as inefficient in capitalist terms. We also talked about trust. I said that I think I trust everyone, but he was actually talking about something else. You can't work equally well with everyone, he said.

***
 

Tuesday 25 August

Today we decided to meet because we were going to look at images together that we could put on the website. We drank freshly squeezed apple juice, which I press by hand because I hate machines in my kitchen. Max mentioned that he has an appointment with a sound engineer soon and this weekend he is meeting with a man who can pull trees out of the forest with horses. He also talked about carts. That silly man. I suddenly remembered that the father of a friend of mine might still have one, so I called him and we drove over there.

I still remember Luc, my friend's father, very well. I still visit him regularly. He made us a Senseo coffee and told stories about the days when they still ploughed with a cart. He remembered being picked up in the morning by his uncle with a horse and cart. It took half an hour to reach the fields with that cart, which weren't even that far away, and around 9 a.m. his mother came to bring sandwiches to the fields and around noon she brought lunch. In the evening, he returned with that horse and again it took them half an hour to get back. He concluded that there was a lot of silence in those days. And peace. That ploughing such a field still took two days back then. But that those days are long gone. He didn't even say it melancholically. With those words, I once again had the image of Max in the forest, with his hand saw and his hand jack and his manual water pump, his toil and sweat. On the way back, Max said it was funny that the man had precisely defined his position towards the world by saying to himself at a certain moment: that time of peace, of horse and cart and silence, is behind us.
 

* Kim Snauwaert is part of the publication team at PLAN B/Veldwerk, where she talks to various artists together with Vincent Focquet.