VERZWINDEN @ Château de Beaurepaire

We’ve been invited for a summer residency at Château de Beaurepaire in July and August to develop and produce a new collection of VERZWINDEN works, which are on show during Les Journées Européennes de Patrimonies 2026.

VERZWINDEN is the title of the research project that we’ve began in 2023. It is a word from Old Germanic, meaning “making an open space in a forest to build a house and a field, large enough for a family”. The limitation in size ensured that the ecosystem was not affected.

The research focuses on the disappearance of nature, people, and places as a result of the global warming caused by our overconsumption. Who or what will determine where nature can survive and where we humans can live in the future? Rainforests are disappearing, ice caps and glaciers are melting, and people are set adrift in search of a new home because entire countries are becoming uninhabitable due to heat, drought, or floods.

We’ve conducted technical research into using UV light from the sun to create images.
We’ve affixed large photographic negatives to pieces of colored wool felt and exposed them to the sun for long periods. The sun’s bleaching effect on the pigment in the felt caused the images to be transferred onto the felt.

We’ve called this technique ‘Evanescotype’, after the Latin term for ‘slowly disappearing’: ‘evanescere’. It takes between 200 and 400 hours to create an image. Sunlight, which is also one of the sources of global warming, is now the technique used by us to make images appear by degrading pigment with UV light.

The invitation to create work at Château de Beaurepaire for two summer months gave us the opportunity to develop and produce new ideas within a very short timeframe, due to the abundant presence of UV light in this region. The castle and its park have themselves also become the subject of the research and of some of the works. Thanks to Patricia Smith and Emile Pennekamp for their hospitality and assistance with this project.

This project was made possible in part by a grant from the Centre for Visual Arts Rotterdam. Artist Tom Gallant has helped us enormously with the technical and visual development of the negatives.

Some of the artworks:

Dendrography
The artwork links the time required for a tree to reach maturity to the rigorous act of felling trees for human consumption, such as in the Amazon. It also represents the history which a tree has been part of during its long existence, functioning as a fruit-bearer, shade provider, landscape element, oxygen producer, and timber supplier. And the tree harbors the history of the place where it is rooted.

Shutter
The curtain is a temporary partition; it is soft and can be pushed aside to let light through or to clear a passage. In this image, it supports an iron gate that for centuries marked the boundary between the courtyard and the garden of the Château. Europe has once again erected its fences to ward off ‘undesirable migrants’.