When you ran as fast as you could to hide behind the trees? Silencing your heart to stop it beating so loudly in your chest in case they heard and found you? Endless laughter written on the delicate paper of a brave explorer’s life.
“When I look at you I find it hard to believe that the whole universe had not conspired to bring you to life. I can’t think of a more beautiful reason for it all to exist than for you in this day.” Atticus
Wolfgang Oude Hengel, sculptor, deep thinker, yogi, intuitive gardener and architect. He works from his huge studio originally part of an old textile factory and his childhood home. His Skeletoni, life-size skeletons take on a rusty life of their own facing the elements in the wild garden. Each joint, limb, and vertebrae is meticulously chiseled into being. The perfectly balanced bodies of iron, embody fragility and interconnectedness, intensity and tenderness. Accompanied by his signature pipe he heats, beats, and bends each joint, limb, and vertebrae into a masterpiece, blending effort with technical mastery. His art navigates the symbolic and the mysterious, merging the visible with the imaginable. A dance between symbolic meaning and mysterious reality, making us question the visible and the imaginable, life and death and beyond.
Maasvlakte 2 is a man-made civil engineering project on reclaimed land. It is an extension of the Port of Rotterdam used for container transport and the chemical industry. A vast industrial landscape of metal and machinery, light and shadows. Seagulls dart back and forth above white plumes of smoke. I’m fascinated by the gigantic scale and beautiful lines of these structures and troubled at the same time how the fragility of the planet remains in balance.
Time a mischievous trickster. One blink and a few hundred years gone. Memories etched on the skins of trees, a closed gate, a lonely succulent. When everyone is asleep, they travel – in dreams past.
It took a few days to finally see the feral horses of Geltinger Birk, a lush nature reserve, sanctuary to thousands of species of flowers, insects and birds in Northern Germany. On a clear day you can see Denmark across the water and if you’re lucky flocks of starling murmurations black out the sky. Walking in the rain on a windswept afternoon the herd appeared from the mist. Almost a mystical experience to witness these magnificent beings. The Konik horse, through selective breeding, is closely related to the now extinct Eurasian wild horse. There are approximately 4000 Koniks worldwide. These horses play a crucial role in managing the vegetation and re-wilding of the wetlands. Besides some occasional bickering and sparring they showed deep respect for one another. Slowly they moved across the water one by one and on to their next place for the night.
Zeeland photoshoot, a huge task ahead of us:
The team looking amazing in front of a blue backdrop. Facing the challenge, strong winds set in. Familiar with the speed that a non-propelled object takes to escape from the gravitational influence of a planet, we accelerated ourselves to the first cosmic velocity. One small step for mankind, but one giant leap for So Splendid. Facts and figures: +++ about 30 billion us dollars was the budget for the entire program +++ 4 dehydrated cheese sandwiches were taken on the mission +++ 528 million people watched the moon landing on tv
Harbour view, ocean view, sky view. Woodstock was waking to a gentle dawn. Andrea, Rike from So Splendid Agency and I were sitting on the rooftop at my house reflecting on our inspiring time together in Cape Town. It may have been the sound of the harbour or perhaps another rhythm in the city which made the story unfold in our hearts and we named it Cape town as a State of Heart – the title of our first book. A collection of images and stories which came together as a different take on Cape Town blurring the boundaries between urban topographics, social documentary, personal diary and conceptual art.
