Sprawling Swamps
2016-ongoing – installation, interactive 3d environment, video, audio
 

 
Horizon Relapse, Festiv Town, Chronic Shoal, Empty Cache, Twin Raft, Swamp of Forked Tongues, Bootleg Tribunal for Nonhumans, Test Den, Hellhole of (re)creation … loopholes within loopholes. Sprawling Swamps (2016–ongoing) is an virtual environment comprised of fictional infrastructral projects which are distributed on locations that exist with the cracks and corners of the contemporary financial geography. Located on swamps, waves, melting ice, erupting volcanoes, shifting shorelines and sinking islands, these fictional scenarios explore value production on unstable terrains where the binary presumption of land and water is ineffective. In these carefully researched locations the dynamic nature geological matter itself – and therefor its territory – complicates legal framing and its absorbance into functional infrastructures, wether legal, physical or social. When territories melt, erode or drown it becomes unclear what is to be governed. It is from this ambiguous condition that ‘Sprawling Swamps’ underpins uncertainty, exhaustion and regression as new forms of value and conditions to be embraced in contemporary life.
 
Sprawling Swamps is a virtual environment which expands with new scenarios over time. Each scenario is developed from a new research trajectory within Herregraven’s practice and simultaneously materialised in various phsyical forms such as installations and sculptures. ‘Sprawling Swamps’ functions as a meta-structure for Herregraven’s practice by hosting the deep entanglement between her works and making them experiential.

 

Docking Station #1, installation view ‘Femke Herregraven’, Westfälischer Kunstverein, 2018

 

 

Docking Station #2, installation views Guangzhou Triennial 6, 2019