Palm is an artistic research developing towards a lecture-performance.

Currently, with the project I'm artist in residence at GUM, a museum for science, arts and curiosity. In the course of the spring 2024 I will exchange with academics, gardeners, artists and other experts.


For ‘Palm’ (working title), I'm looking into the topic of palm trees. As an iconic image of 'the south', I think palms say a lot about how we tend to think of 'the south', in the dual sense of being both a holiday resort and a giant orchard (today, in the case of palm trees, for example for palm oil).

Looking at both sides, I'm interested in how perceptions of the 'south' on the one hand, and exploitation on the other, are related to each other. I keep in mind Eduardo Galeano’s these, made in his book The Open Veins of Latin America, where he explains ‘the poverty of the people as a result of the richness of the land’ - and take this as a touch stone with regard to palm trees.

Palms lead to diverse (but related) topics such as exoticism, the global food economy, plantation capitalism, botanical history, and plant migration. Reading history through palm trees is fascinating, for their own history is highly emblematic: its transformation from a tree of life (the oil palm in West-Africa, the date palm in the Middle East, the coconut palm on Pacific Islands) to an often displaced cash crop; from its place in the very heart of nature, commodified into the heart of exploitative plantation capitalism.


with the support of: gouvernement, the Flemish Government
residencies: GUM (Ghent University Museum), wpZimmer, School van Gaasbeek, Zuidpool, Kunstenwerkplaats