Marjolijn Dijkman (NL)

Born in 1978, Groningen, the Netherlands
Lives and works in Rotterdam

Marjolijn Dijkman’s projects reveal and question the ways in which we receive and interpret information about our surroundings.

Dijkman’s work ‘All Alone Among the Stars’ (2007-ongoing) was first presented in the 2007 dertien hectare exhibition The field that longed for fame and has a permanent presence on the site.

When walking around the dertien hectare terrain visitors encounter a simple white sign that states, in Dutch, English and Polish: ‘One of the oak trees in this forest has been exchanged with an oak tree of a similar age from the Bialowieza National Park, the largest remaining primeval forest in Europe, on the border of Poland and Belarus’.

For ‘The woods that see and hear’ exhibition, Dijkman presents an afternoon of discussion, entitled The forest as witness, on 6 June as part of this ongoing project. The event will examine this tree exchange and address issues such as environmental and agricultural policy in the Netherlands (including the subsidy schemes which enabled the planting of trees on the dertien hectare site); the mythological and symbolic function of a forest; and the idea that a forest can act as a witness to human activity over time.

Speakers: Onno de Bruijn, Marjolijn Dijkman, Koen Kleijn (moderator), Rudy Luijters, Mark de Wit.