Engraved

‘Engraved’ is a series of three sculptures made from shrapnel collected in the forests marked by World War I in Verdun, France. These rusty metal residues remind us of the bark of spruce trees ravaged by bark beetles in this forest. The bark beetle’s name, ‘Ips typographus’, meaning “engraver,” refers to the wood galleries it creates under the bark. The pieces of shrapnel were engraved with patterns resembling the branching galleries created by bark beetles. The engravings reveal the shiny metal of the shrapnel, reminding us that the estimated 12 -15 million unexploded ordnances buried in the Red Zone of Verdun are beneath a layer of rust, still in perfect condition.

‘Engraved’ 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 thousands of hectares of the polluted landscape in the Zone Rouge in France as part of post-war restitution. They planted many monocropped Norway spruces in straight rows, following the scientific forest management system invented in Germany. These dense forests were intended to keep people out, creating a ‘Living Sarcophagus.’

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

In the scorching summers of 2018 and 2019, a hundred years after WWI ended, the bark beetle Ips Typographus invaded these monoculture forests around Verdun. The National Forestry Agency (ONF) has cleared the infected areas in the last few years. This is important to avoid forest fires, but it is a dangerous and slow process due to the millions of unexploded ordnance still present in the soil. In the research project ‘Between the Lines,’ the sanitized, barren, and reopened landscape symbolizes the consequences of the war, the industrialization of forest management, and the impact of the current climate crisis.