HD video, colour/audio, 20’20”, 2020

Mistakes. The artist talk is one of the most important works of Summoning a Forest. It was followed up by NGMI in 2022.

On Wednesday, April 29, 2020, I was supposed to give a talk at the end of my two months involvement in Residency Unlimited in New York. 

Instead, I a had flown back home to Belgium on March 15, after the first pandemic lockdowns became active. Back in my studio, I had trouble processing not only all information I collected during my short stay, but also the unusual dynamics that came with the Covid-19 pandemic. My post-apocalyptic body of work, the related research involving spruce bark beetle outbreaks, and the new situation intersected.  

I lost sight of the ‘Universe of Former Normality’, in which I was still in New York. However, at the end of April the residency reached out to me asking if I would be willing to give the talk through means of a recording. I snapped out of my artistic bewilderment and made – in the timeframe of only a week – ‘Mistakes’, a 20 minute ‘hyperspace powerpoint video collage’ that functions as an intermediate report for the first six months of my doctoral research, while reflecting the surrealness of the pandemic experience. 

Despite its ‘mistakes’, the film remains topical, and is often part of my lectures. Below the film, embedded here, is a detailed breakdown of the creation process which, due to the pressing deadline, barely discerned between conceptual conception and production.