Traces

‘Traces’ is a series of five sculptures made from shrapnel collected in the forests marked by World War I in Verdun in France (1914-1918). These residues of rusty metals are strangely reminiscent of the bark of spruce trees ravaged by the bark beetle Ips typographus in this forest.

For this series, five individual pieces of shrapnel are engraved with patterns resembling the small bark beetles created on the bark and trees where they reside, as well as the patterns of the trenches dug by soldiers a hundred years ago.

‘Traces’ is part of the research project ‘Between the Lines,’ which focuses on the catastrophic effects of drought and climate change in the forests of the Zone Rouge in the northeast of France. It relates to the ongoing struggle to deal with the aftermath and remnants of the First World War within the global climate crisis, which impacted this particular landscape on a monumental scale.

Germany donated spruces to reforest the thousands of hectares of polluted landscape in the Zone Rouge in France as post-war restitution. They planted many mono-cropped Norway spruces in straight rows, following the scientific production forest management invented in Germany. These dense forests aimed to protect people from entering, creating a ‘Living Sarcophagus.’

Barren landscape in Verdun on former battlefields, photo Marjolijn Dijkman, 2023

In the scorching summer of 2018 and 2019, a hundred years after WWI ended, the bark beetle Ips Typographus invaded these monoculture forests. The National Forestry Agency (ONF) has by now cleared most of the infected areas. This is important to avoid forest fires, a dangerous and slow process with abundant pieces of unexploded ordnance in the soil. The sanitized, barren, and re-opened landscape symbolizes the consequences of the war, the industrialization of forest management, and the impact of the current climate crisis.