David Claerbout The woodcarver and the forest, 2025
50 x 89 cm (b/w photographs) (6 parts, each)
The performative film installation The woodcarver conveys the artist’s continuous research into the consequences, contradictions, and paradoxes of the ‘return to nature’ trends in a cultural landscape of oversaturation and immersive mediation. The work revolves around two figures: one of a solitary woodcarver and another of a forest serving as his limited resource. The woodcarver is a bearded, pale, white man dressed as a lumberjack. He spends his days inside a neo-brutalist villa defined by a glazed floor-to-ceiling window wall facing a forest. From dusk to dawn, his sole, ceaseless activity is carving wooden spoons out of the forest’s tree logs. However, we do not see him felling trees, cutting them into logs, and carrying them inside. He does not approach the outside but sits behind the window’s glass screen, carving. The window is also a video screen, blocking off, protecting from, and filtering the world behind it. The film constantly shifts between the inside and the outside, tracing the hardly discernible depletion of the forest and the processing of its trees into wooden spoons, until it is cleared.
