Hotel Bellevue
Dries Segers
The exhibition Hotel Bellevue starts from the idea of a border tree. Border trees were once planted as a kind of guardian, a marker in the landscape used by legal authorities to outline the area where they could wield their power. It's a tool to settle border conflicts, or to use the tree to navigate. Hotel Bellevue is a manifesto for love, anger, desire to connect, speculate and study.
When you think about these trees, you discuss territories, politics, crisis, botanical species, animals ,... because talking about these trees is not only talking about wood. The natural world is not following manmade islands. Fungi are having an enormous network beyond any kind of border (wood wide web), pollinators work where ever they find a flower to take pollen from, birds migrate around the globe using it as a whole, not as a (flexible) puzzle of fragments. In a changing and unstable climate, the idea of border trees give us the opportunity to reintroduce this local and community driven use of the landscape and learn from the stories and information that gets triggered by this landmark.
Dries Segers (°1990, Belgium) is a photographer, fabulator, storyteller and plant bender. He works with various media and print-techniques. His work is centered around photographic fabulation with a main focus on the non-human, invisibles and ecological meltdown. Segers works with the history of photography by activating the use of specific techniques and attitudes. This results in plant based prints, camera-less photographs and extreme close-up photography.
