Esther Kokmeijer

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/// Contribution for the book “A summary of the world” – Esther Kokmeijer (English) ///

LAND ART
Carolien van den Akker (1975) Art historian

A narrow road leads me into the countryside. Stubbles in the earth. The corn in the fields has recently been cut. I cross a stream by a little wooden footbridge. The field is edged by a line of trees. In the distance I can see farms enclosed by tall trees. Overhead a blanket of clouds. I see things sharply and experience the surroundings intensely. The Polish artist Paweł Althamer induced me to take this nature walk. The work is called ‘Path’ and is part of the septennial sculpture exhibition Münster 2007. A path and a nature walk as art project. It is one of the strongest works in the exhibition.
 
I can imagine that travel photographer and designer Esther Kokmeijer (1977) would share my love of Alhamer’s work. She has made travel the subject of her work. In 2003 and 2004 she went on a 15-month journey travelling to the geographical centres of six continents. The French geographer Jean-Georges Affholder(1) calculated for Esther Kokmeijer the coordinates of the current geographical centres of Africa, North America, South America, Oceania, Asia and Europe. Esther Kokmeijer goes in search and marks these spots in the landscape.
 
The art of travelling
Esther Kokmeijer has an inner drive to travel. ‘I feel free when I am travelling. I am much more sensitive to everything around me. My senses are wide open. I see more, hear more, smell and feel more. And I am more open to people(2).’ In the light of Esther Kokmeijer’s project, the somewhat clichéd expression the journey is the destination takes on a meaning again. To her the journey really is her destination. So long as it takes her to the geographical centres of the continents. ‘The geographical centres would feel empty if I had not actually travelled there, but had just gone straight there. The journey unfolds for her and her companion Gijs Bekenkamp as a matter of course. They let it happen.
It is important to Esther Kokmeijer to travel over land. ‘That way you don’t miss anything. You can take in the whole continent. From country to country. From town to town. Culture to culture. I was really able to experience each continent.’

Travelling is about following a particular path. And about the passing of time. Esther Kokmeijer captures both these aspects. She keeps a record of the distances she travels each day and a note of the coordinates. On her travels across the continents she photographs every place she sleeps in. The photos show that she has bridged a certain distance and come to somewhere new. She also collected all kinds of materials along the way. The photographs and the collections make up a visual diary enabling us to follow her day by day.
 
Richard Long
In the 1960’s a number of artists exchanged their sterile gallery for unspoilt nature. The wide outdoors, the vast countryside became their work field. They make changes, add things. That is their art: Land Art The English artist Richard Long goes on walks through the countryside. To him, the essence is the activity of walking. To him, walking is a way of exploring the relation between time, distance and place. Or as Long puts it: ‘My work is about my senses, my instinct, my own scale and my own physical commitment(3).’ He marks his walks on maps. His accounts are short, characteristic statements. ‘Walking to a Lunar Eclipse’ (1996) and ‘Walking to a Solar Eclipse’ (1999) are examples of this.

Marking the landscape
‘For me the heart of a continent represents the essence of it. Something that is in the middle is beautiful. The middle of a person is the navel, the source of life. And the middle is the heart around which a town or village develops. All the lines come together in the middle.’ For Esther Kokmeijer, the geographical centres of the continents are places with an emotional charge. And it is the journey to these impressive places that makes that charge perceptible.
‘The work of art is not put in a place, it is that place.’ The words of the American land artist Michael Heizer are also true of Esther Kokmeijer’s work. The strength of the project lies especially in the exceptional nature of her destination. She is not the first artist to use special geographical places as a departure point for their work. In 1968 the American Land Artist Dennis Oppenheim created a sculpture on the American-Canadian border. ‘Annual Rings’. The border forms the meridian of large, concentric circles, dug out in the snow. It was the time of the Vietnam War. Many American soldiers fled across the Canadian border to avoid conscription. In 1992 artist Magdalene Jetelova created ‘Project Iceland’. She devised the plan to visualise the divide between the land masses of Eurasia and America. This divide runs largely along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean and only surfaces in Iceland. Jetelova drew a sharp line through the countryside using white laser light.
American Land Artists like Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson like exaggerated gestures. They use mechanical diggers to move tons of sand and stones to create a sculpture. For ‘Spiral Jetty’ (1970) Smithson erected an embankment of 6,783 tons of stones and soil on the bottom of the lake at Salt Lake City where a huge spiral, four and a half metres in diameter, rises to the surface.
Esther Kokmeijer and Richard Long are more subtle when interfering with the landscape. Long creates sculptures by rearranging stones he finds during his walks. Esther Kokmeijer attaches great value to the temporariness of the markings she creates on the continental geographical centres. She has no wish to claim that spot. She uses natural materials such as tree trunks, branches and sand. All her markings are one metre by one metre. In time they will be incorporated back into the soil. In Africa she marked the spot by scraping off a layer of soil to remove the harder, darker layer beneath. The works come into being then and there. Without any predetermined plan. Inspired by intuition.
 
Totality a must
Six continents and their geographical centres. Six unimportant squares situated in the centre of a huge surface. Esther Kokmeijer went in search of them all. The beauty of the project lies in the scale of the venture and the uncompromising approach. She did not travel through one or two continents, she travelled through all six. Totality a must. In so doing she created her own personal summary of the world.

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(1)Geographer Jean-Georges Affholder is connected with the Institut Géographique National in Paris. The method he used is described on page (021).

(2)Interview with the artist, 27 October 2007.

(3)Richard Long, Five, six, pick up sticks. Seven, eight, lay them straight (1980). Text published in: Kastner, J., Wallis, B., Land and Environmental Art, p. 241 and 242.