In 2019, a spruce bark beetle outbreak destroyed almost all trees on a plot of family land in the South of the Netherlands. The dead trees were cleared because they posed a hazard to hikers passing by the terrain, or threatened to damaged the fence of an adjacent meadow.

The forester who logged the land left three dead tree trunks standing in the center of the terrain as vantage points for birds of prey. The stumps were prominently visible from a distance. They resembled a monument, and I decided to treat them as such.

Over the following few years, I added small plaques that commemorated the beetle’s passage or alluded to the reasons for the ecological degradation of the former forest and its subsequent vulnerability for pests: a combination of drought and heat stress, and diminishing soil quality.

Additionally, a circular wood wall was made to enclose the ’totems’, with help of the local organisation Outdoor Enzo. It caused the trunks to be highlighted even more on the barren terrain. The enclosure became a small arena to discuss ecological and climatological issues with passers-by and invitees to The Plot, as the clear-cut was called.

Some time after the logging, it became clear that the terrain began a new phase of transformation. To document this process, I not only used photos, but also drone images and 3d scans. The scans are made using photogrammetry and lidar – two methods that build a virtual 3d copy from a physical original.