info@nelebrokelmann.com / 1988, based in The Hague / Royal Academy of Art The Hague, The Hague, 2018 – Diploma in Master of Music at the ArtScience Interfaculty / AKV St. Joost, Breda, 2013 – Diploma in Bachelor of Fine Arts / www.nelebrokelmann.com
Difference across Distance started as a speculative field research during the Destination Unknown Residency 2021 and is based on the different parallel (un-)natural border regions around Tegelen (NL): the river Meuse, the highway A73, the state-border between the Netherlands and Germany, and the forest, heathland and moorland of the Brachter Wald on the German side. By walking along and crossing these border regions, I investigated the subtle traces of how they evolve with and through one another.
Field Research Trips:
FR #1 – 22.07.2021: walking along the river Meuse after the weekend of the floods, crossing it by highway-bridge and ferry
FR #2 – 23.07.2021: walking along the German‐Dutch and Brachter Wald border, from Swalmen to Venlo
FR #3 – 21.08.2021: crossing borders, walking from Swalmen (NL) to Brüggen (DE) along the border of the Brachter Wald, and back through the Brachter Wald
Alongside the walks and their documentation in photographs, writings and drawings, I have been reading into Lynn Margulis’ theory of Endosymbiosis in parallel with the reading of Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence. Biologist Margulis developed the theory of Endosymbiosis to describe the cooperativeness of inter- special relations, departed from the competitive framing. The way biological entities evolve and sustain by changing with and through one another, intrigues me. Latour emphasises that the different domains in our Western societies, as politics, law, science, and religion, are no different, and proposes ways to rethink these categories to give room to experience the world relationally.
Living beings “are open systems, organized by the energy
and materials that incessantly flow through us.”
– Acquiring Genomes, Margulis & Dorion, 2003, p. 45
