BLACK COLOURED HORIZON explores grief as a process that is personal, ecological and political. Visitors of Oerol are invited to bring compost back to the forest, as part of a grief walk and interactive installation. Dan Afrifa spoke with Chihiro Geuzebroek, co-creator of this collective act of reciprocity with the earth.
Staging Wood is the overarching, multi-year coalition research into the human relationship with the forest and the four stages of life: germination, growth, decay and death. This Oerol year, Elmo Vermijs and you will focus on the last stage. What do you remember most from the previous stage?
‘We explored the relationship between the honey fungus and the pine forest, where this much-maligned fungus breaks through the monoculture planted by humans. In the workshops we reflected on our role in the destruction of modern plantations, the dependence on monocultures for our food and also on sweatshops for our clothing. What I learned was a mix of benevolence – the willingness of people to enter into uncomfortable experiences – and the “rush to innocence”, the tendency to see yourself as a friend of nature without fully acknowledging your own position in the power structures.’
How do you see the contrast between the lively summer days on Terschelling and the theme of dying?
‘In our Western culture, we often think of dying only in terms of our own death, but death is always around us in the world. Every day, 25,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, die from hunger and related causes. Every minute, more than 11 football fields of forest are cut down.’
‘What we are trying to do is create space for mourning. Not as an empty hole, but as an expression of love that hurts. We want to show how new things can emerge from mourning. Just like in the forest, where the dying of trees returns their energy to the earth, which turns into compost and creates new life.’
In collaboration with the Terschelling sawmill and furniture maker Island Woods, you bring compost from decayed trees back to the forest, a process of both ‘taking away’ and ‘bringing back’. How does this fit in with your vision of what is organic?
‘Since 2023, we have been using residual flows from trees, such as wood chips, in a biomeiler – a composting process that converts “wood waste” into new life. Compost belongs back in the forest, especially in an environment with poor soil, microplastics and little growth. This year, it concerns about 35 cubic meters of black earth. The blacker the earth, the more life it supports. Black is associated with mourning in many cultures, but in our installation it stands for fertile new beginnings. Everything becomes food for something greater.’
Many cultures use the ritual of burial in a coffin, which reinforces the separation between humans and nature. Does your project challenge this separation?
‘Last year I wrote an article discussing how the word ‘nature’ in the environmental movement reinforces the separation between humans and the rest of the world. In our project we work with concepts from indigenous languages that emphasize the interconnectedness of life. We do not question funeral rituals, but seek meaning in loss and the metabolization of grief.’
‘I was inspired by the Dagara people of West Africa, who mandate monthly mourning rituals to process unresolved grief, so that it does not rot within the community. This offers an opportunity for joy and connection, something that stands in contrast to a capitalist system that rewards people for numbing emotions in order to quickly become productive again. In our project we investigate how we can socialize grief – with each other and with the landscape, by experiencing the digestion process of grief emotionally.’
For this installation you wrote the song Black Coloured Horizon. The poetry you use, such as ‘Ancestral dirty laundry’ and ‘The theft of belonging’, evokes images of loss and detachment. Can you elaborate on these images, especially in the context of political mourning?
‘Ancestral dirty laundry points to two things: first, mourning is not just about the loss of a loved one, but also about centuries of dehumanization of Indigenous peoples and structural death through policy. For this project I was strongly inspired by Achille Mbembe’s work on necropolitics, a politics that produces death.
Second, mourning is not a one-time event, but a daily ritual. It is the constant tending of your soul and relationships, the clearing out and restoring of connections.
Ancestral dirty laundry came out of a conversation with Camille Barton, who wrote about mourning. This image gave me joy because it showed me that working with the heavy burden of centuries of dehumanization can also be liberating. It’s like washing clothes: you feel lighter and cleaner after you’ve done it.’
After four years of intensive research and artistic exploration through four stages, how do you feel this project has changed you as a person and as an artist?
As a maker, I often jump from one assignment to another, touching on deep concepts, but not being able to engage with them for long periods of time. This four-year collaboration allowed me to find my own voice at the intersection of activism, ecology, and art. I had the space to not have to know things right away and let them ferment over time.
