Peer reviewed research catalogue exposition for VIS, Nordic Journal for Artistic Research issue #6: Contagion (October 2021). Many thanks to peer reviewer Sepideh Karami.

“The issue, which features five expositions, deals in different ways with touch, vulnerability, and transmission; contagion becomes a creative and destructive concept in the shadow of the pandemic.” – Anna Lindal, editor of VIS #6

The Research Catalogue collects multimedia publications in the format of ‘expositions’: web-based presentation formats that may include video and audio files alongside texts, and that can be flexible in size and design. The format is quite compatible with born-digital work.

The image below shows a screenshot of the landing page for the exposition. The background is a wallpaper design based on spruce bark beetle traces. On top of it is the elevation map of The Plot, a family terrain in the Netherlands, central to the article. The graphic elements are .gif animated links, taking the visitor to various regions of the main exposition.

Visit the exposition on the Research Catalogue platform. The article is best viewed on a desktop computer. The Plot, The Compositor, and Mourning Mistakes was awarded second place of the SAR prize for excellent exposition 2021.

From the jury report:

“The exposition “Plot, the Compositor, Mourning/Mistakes” https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1057314/1273089 by Alexandra Crouwers represents a speculative and non-linear design approach to the concept of exhibition. It creates an intricate network between visual pieces of evidence of the ecological collapse of a forest and a reflexive review of the artist’s grief.

Crouwers’s work thesis immediately resonated with the pandemic times experiencing virtual dislocation and complex mimeticism of nature in response to lockdowns. The work presented is timely as virtual workers and artists experience the technological takeover as physical communal spaces become increasingly rare. Alexandra’s background in virtual and technical art vibrates on the Research Catalogue platform as items that function to deliver information on the topic often also serve an aesthetic purpose supporting their thesis.“

Fragment from the exposition text:

For over 15 years, an important part of my artistic practice arises in the digital realm: in the infinite void right behind the glass of my computer screen, where I’m navigating between the virtual x, y, and z axes of 3D software.

In this immaterial environment, I’ve imagined Distant Pasts and Far Futures in which my concern for the ecological state of this planet lingered. Until recently, I would say that escapism is my core business. 

In my urban studio, my view on the city’s rooftops would be replaced with wide landscapes, simulated nature inhabited by artificial trees. The densely populated area outside, with its impossibly complicated social relations, is exchanged for uninhabited worlds. Here, humanity would be reduced to remnants. 

Between 2019 and 2023 I am working on a doctoral artistic research project, The Appeal of the Unreal (Summoning a Forest, AC, 2025), that began as an investigation of simulated nature through screen culture and habitat dioramas. But already within months of the start of this route, something happened that awoke a sense of urgency, pulling the project out of the comfort of the virtual axes and dropping it in Real Life coordinates.

Originally, the term ‘contagion’ was reserved for the spreadability of diseases. In Spillover. Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (W. W. Norton & Company, 2012) author David Quammen explains abundantly the close relation between the rising numbers of emerging viruses and the progressing ecological disturbances by human interventions. 

This exposition is centered on a parallel kind of contagion: an infestation of spruce bark beetles, amplified by changing climatological circumstances. 

Similar to a virus, a beetle plague is only really noticeable after its result inflates to our visibility scale. In the case of this exposition, branches started to break off, some trees fell down during storms, needles turned brown and were shed, and eventually a small forest died. 

This former forest is now The Plot.

In my artistic output, non-linearity is an unlikely constant. Actions can take place simultaneously, in another sphere, or in random order. There’s something of a timeline when it comes to the geological record of The Plot, but the path of chronology is more or less abandoned in this virtual record.  

All you need to know is this: in the early 1960s, my grandfather bought a small forest near the village where he was born. Being from a Catholic farmer’s family in the south of the Netherlands, my grandparents produced an impressive number of family members, all of them with a relation to het bosje (the little forest), as we would call it. In my childhood, we would have pic nics there, and later on, we would regularly visit the little forest to see how it was evolving. After my grandparents died, my mother inherited it. She’s the current owner, and my partner in crime.

In September 2019, the little forest had to be cleared, and it transformed into The Plot. The Plot has become an arena for artistic research, functioning as a lens to investigate greater ecological issues. It now embodies ecological grief.

In 2020, the global upheaval of a virus added multiple dimensions to The Plot. We need to find ways to deal with issues that are beyond a human scale, and that resonate beyond our lifetime. 

At the moment, The Plot is slowly being prepared for regeneration: a road that leads far beyond the horizon of my lifetime. There are many questions as to where to begin, what to set as targets, and how to proceed. A special role lies in building a mythology around The Plot. This proves to come easy: despite its relatively poor geological composition, The Plot is a quite fertile land for the imagination.

Some of the works you’re presented with in this exposition have multiple aims, but they all arise from a desperate need to somehow help fix things. In that process, mistakes are made. I consider these mistakes to be of artistic value. In some cases, I’m even deliberately involved in scientific quackery, which I find an equally artistic medium.

This presentation shows part of the results of the first one-and-a-half year of my PhD trajectory.