KALI WAAL

In the short film KALI WAAL, landscape design is both poison and remedy. A nature reserve in the Netherlands is the setting for an ecological controversy. Decades of industrial sand extraction created lakes so deep that no light can reach the bottom. Industries recently started to dump contaminated mud in these lakes, claiming that this will increase the biodiversity. A group of researchers gradually discovers that this landscape is neither an innocent rewilding project, nor an ecological dead-end. As resilient forms of life take center stage, a new ecology of plants, bacteria, animals, and machines increasingly takes over the film.

The film evolved through conversations that the filmmaker had with local activist groups, water ecologists from the University of Wageningen – and an international group of artistic researchers. Besides these human characters, the film also involves non-human actors that have influenced the recordings, such as; a herd of cows, horses, crabs, insects and a dog.

Bio director:
Jasper Baldwin Coppes (1983, Amsterdam) is a visual artist who works in a diverse range of media such as films, sound performances, installations and writing. In these, Coppes explores the ways in which dominant narratives about the world and its inhabitants can be transformed. Controversial landscapes, other-than-human entities and silent objects have often been the core interests in his practice. Coppes graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2008 and was a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2010 and 2011. He has participated in international exhibitions, film festivals and conferences and is a tutor at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.