Ghost Reef (2020-ongoing),
Xandra van der Eijk

She/her — NL

Exhibition: Mutation
Wednesday 8 June till Sunday 19 June — Dokzaal

Opening | 17:00—23:00 (free admission)
Tue - Fri | 13:00—20:00
Sat & Sun | 10:00—20:00
Mon | closed

Life adapts, mutates and finds new forms of interdependency with its surroundings, even in intense human-influenced environments. With thousands of ship- and plane wrecks covering the North Sea floor, and a growing amount of structures such as fossil fuel rigs and windmills serving as substrates, new underwater communities are continuously forming. Each artificial reef can exist due to its particular geographical location, and so forms an ecosystem unique in its composition and identity. The reefs themselves can be considered time capsules, showing how the process of anthropogenic colonisation of the sea enters into the natural archive, as the overgrown shipwrecks, abandoned wells, and drilling platforms are entangled with ghosts of past and present activities in the form of old ammunition, fishing gear and lost cargo. 

 With Ghost Reef, Van der Eijk feeds the fantasy of a North Sea filled with patchy reefs in the spectator's imagination. Animated video collages with 3D models based on the scarce footage taken by divers are juxtaposed with field recording soundscapes taken at two locations: an oyster bank near the Brouwersdam in Zeeland located in the south of the Netherlands, and the wreck of the Ara, a steamship that was sunk by a mine in 1942, located north of Schiermonnikoog in the northern part of Dutch waters.

 The many artificial substrates in the North Sea are biodiversity hotspots. Cold water coral reefs surely play an immense role in the bigger ecosystem of the European continental shelf — however, they are barely researched nor protected. But North Sea coral is special: the many patches of reef demonstrate an unexpected emergence of life in an environment under immense anthropogenic pressure.