Connecting people through art 

Single channel video with sculptural elements
Produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation

The Disorientated Garden…A Breath of Dream takes inspiration from the ancient, untamed garden as a fertile ground for co-existing (his)stories, temporalities, human and non-human entities, each imprinted in this fictitious space, an abstracted portrait of the Central Highlands. Visitors can approach the individual artworks or the overall installation through different lenses: the anthropological, the poetic, the historic, the ecological and the dreamt. Spots of light in the video (spirits? our consciousness? a default with the camera?), insects, forest sounds, musical gourds, grass, cascades, animal taxidermy, abstract shapes on the surface of lacquer, living plants, beaded garlands are interlocutors in an epic retelling of a land.

The video is composed of various scenes unrelated to one another in mood or aesthetic with no traditional narrative linking them together besides being filmed in different parts of the Central Highlands. Yet by assembling these imagescapes together, the artist manages to create a meditative space — a dream mode — that allows us to navigate and understand the various realities of this territory.

In some shots, nature appears as an unspoilt, pre-modern land not yet claimed as territory. But as we know, it has endured colonisations of many kinds, causing our customs, beliefs and relationship to nature to change, to be forgotten. Nowadays the area has become the site for the mass production of commercial wood and agricultural produce, with trees deemed sacred by indigenous communities replaced with those that have become a commodity, and once-luxuriant hills now adorned with the manicured capes of coffee and pepper plantations. But if we step back from the context of the Central Highlands, it is of course a story that repeats itself everywhere. As climate change forces humans and fauna to relocate, so do the smallest material and intangible things. From seedlings to spirituality, they migrate and take root in unfamiliar environments while others inevitably disappear.

Whether the title alludes to our own ephemeral organisms, the earth's capacity for storytelling, or the devastating herbicidal warfare the land has endured, none attempt to overpower the other. Each reality of this land exists in an echo chamber of superimposing pasts and presents, forming different strata of soil within the same earth.