“The radicant develops in accord with its host soil. It conforms to the latter’s twists and turns and adapts to its surfaces and geological features. It translates itself into the terms of the space in which it moves.” – Nicolas Bourriaud
This figure of the radicant represents an organism in transit, but at the same time, linked to the context through which it moves. A processual body, that merges with the changing landscape and is transformed by it. It is this type of intra-actions that the work of Saskia Noor van Imhoff points at. She addresses this spacetime by connecting it to traces, remnants and relations. During her stay at L21 Residency she combines this hauntology to methods of plant propagation. In the resulting exhibition, titled “Rooting Hormones”, she posits grafting as metaphor for the progress of culture. Van Imhoff brings together a series of objects that present fragments and representations of all their prior states and forms, including symbolic and projected meanings, compressed into a single physical chunck of matter in the present. Their trajectory through time, its traces, their former state and wherabouts are present in this one appearance through marks, materials and composure. Precisely this contemporary presence is relevant to the artist.
Systems are the essence of Van Imhoff’s practice. She reflects on the rules and regulations that make for our conditions of living in both her exhibitions and individual works. This entails reflections on man-made structures: the ways we are educated and disciplined through knowledge systems, (in)formalities of culture and, human structures that systematically classify and differentiate. These are artificial categories created for the distinctive purpose of ordering our environment and allocating value. This includes differentiation between here and there, then and now, human and nature, commodity and waste, objects and materials or, plant and animal species. Her practice is concerned with the fundamental architecture of our existence in an artistic context, this would include the modes of selection, curating and preservation regarding our surroundings: the considerations that make for the political forces that ascribe value and produce appreciation and (re)presentation of art.
