Suara AlaM's
Whispers of God
Sound Artist
Death Sentence
Death Sentence
“bruised
bloodied
lying here
feeling it -
the exquisite pain
of being done,
of having just begun.
- i, wide open”
- Vicki Rivard -
In the period 2012-2020, the combustion of wood pellets for energy generation in Europe has doubled from 15 to 30 million tons per year. The extraction of wood for hot pellets takes place through industrial clear-cutting of forests.
In practice, natural forests are cut down and converted into wood fields. Entire trees go into the shredder on site and enter the port of Rotterdam as wood pellets. Entire forests are burned with billions in subsidies. No sawdust or residual waste is burned; but whole trees that are so necessary for biodiversity and air purification. These can be 100 years old, from habitats of protected animals or from rich peat soils. The trees are burned as biomass, a controversial but heavily subsidized alternative to coal. Ecocide as a result of biomass combustion.
This takes place in the southeastern United States, European Baltic states such as Estonia and Latvia, and Northern countries like Finland. Those countries earn billions from the sale of their timber. Customers include the Netherlands and England, where entire forests with billions of euros in subsidies end up as "sustainable energy source" in coal-fired and biomass plants. Wood is the new gold.
1 biomass plant has a capacity of 90 megawatts and will burn 175,000 tons of wood pellets annually. That comes down to the annual clear-cutting of a forest of 4 by 4 km; as big as the Municipality of Amsterdam. Every year 20,000 football fields are subsidized; 29,000 trees per day, 21 trees per minute; 2.5 billion kg per year; which is transported by polluting ships from abroad.
With my sculpture Death Sentence I want to address how this destruction of natural forests impacts the living environment of animals, like deer. From the moment they are born, they are already doomed. If they are not shot by hunters, they will die due to destruction of their habitat. Therefore I made a deer-like sculpture which resembles a living animal on one hand, but also shows partly dead structures like a skull and bones. I used leftover bark from felled wood that looks like wounds from ripped pieces of flesh. So the wounded leftover pieces of trees taken down, were incorporated into the deer to show how this is hurting the animals as well.
In the eigth picture, there is a scenery together with the sculpture that tells the whole story in one view. This place used to be a large beautiful forest. You can still see the hunter's shoot house that was surrounded by trees in the past; now all around the trees are destroyed. On the ground the left tree pieces have turned brown and red; just as the colouring of my sculpture.
Keywords: Destruction, Ecocide, Environment, Wood Industry, Biomass, Sustainable Energy
Dimensions:
100cm x 45cm x 119cm
Technique and used material
metal wire sculpting; clay sculpting; wool needle felting; paiting
wire mesh; clay (under jaw of the skull, antler and eye); acrylics; merino wool; taxidermy upper skull and leg bones; tree bark, pine tree branch (tail)