Ants Trilogy: Magic Dome

I worked with two coexisting domes at the unique site of De Koepel. The architectural dome holds the slow, heavy duration of the former prison. Its material time lingers as a discomfort between past confinement and contemporary forms of soft control.

Beneath it, the dome of the ants proposes another temporal possibility: porous, decentralised, constantly recomposed at a six-feet scale. Their movements, pauses and collective decisions are made in the present, yet generate long-term resilience. This resonates with the multiple groups of people who now use De Koepel as a place for making, learning and gathering.

The juxtaposition of the two domes, one from the obsession with centralised control and the other from collective intelligence, invites visitors to reflect on how we might live with inherited histories while imgagining future possibilities.

A site-specific work made for De Koepel, Haarlem (NL), during the Van Stigt-ing Residency and shown in the duo exhibition What the Eye Cannot Hold.