On Beavers and Bureacracy (2025)
On Beavers and Bureaucracy is an artist book built as a fictitious bureaucratic dossier documenting the environmental interventions of beavers.
Starting from a 2025 news story about beavers constructing in one night a dam that authorities had spent more than ten years trying to realise, the work plays with the contrast between non-human agency and human systems of documentation and control.
I created the folder, documents and photographs, using traces of beaver activity photographed in Oostduin Park in The Hague. Scans of gnawed branches and pieces of wood become part of the fictional archive. As the photographic sequence progresses, the images become darker and the black bureaucratic text gradually disappears into the photographic surface, leaving the material traces of the beavers behind.
The project uses the language of bureaucracy to question how human systems attempt to classify, organise and contain reality.
Starting from a 2025 news story about beavers constructing in one night a dam that authorities had spent more than ten years trying to realise, the work plays with the contrast between non-human agency and human systems of documentation and control.
I created the folder, documents and photographs, using traces of beaver activity photographed in Oostduin Park in The Hague. Scans of gnawed branches and pieces of wood become part of the fictional archive. As the photographic sequence progresses, the images become darker and the black bureaucratic text gradually disappears into the photographic surface, leaving the material traces of the beavers behind.
The project uses the language of bureaucracy to question how human systems attempt to classify, organise and contain reality.
Photography, printed documents, stencil duplication and scanned materials.