Issues of environmental neglect and destruction rear their head in the documentary practices of three artists working on different continents.  

Questioning the global exploitation of natural resources, young Belgian theatremakers Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere began developing The Mining Trilogy in 2016, and it has since played at numerous festivals and venues across Europe and Asia. It will be staged at The Studios 2023 alongside Singapore artist Robert Zhao’s recreation of a secondary forest in his immersive performance installation Albizia. Robert is known for his photography-based, ecologically-themed works which have been internationally exhibited, and which have incorporated multi-disciplinary and performance elements in recent years. 

In this interview, all three share their unique approaches to the documentary form, while reflecting on how art can expand the conversation on pressing environmental issues. 

When you have to fill up forms, what do you write under ‘Occupation’ and why? 

Silke: I guess for us it’s pretty straightforward, we use ‘theatre artists’, or ‘theatremaker’. But sometimes I also fill in ‘teacher’ in other contexts, since I am one too.  

Robert: I usually put ‘photographer’ rather than ‘artist’ because it’s much easier to explain myself, if ever there was a need to talk about what I do. It’s a conversation I do not wish to have at the Customs. 

Silke and Hannes, your works employ a lot of technology or digital devices that people may not associate with theatre. So how do you describe your brand of theatre? 

Hannes: I don't think we have a specific term, but it's often described as documentary theatre or multimedia documentary theatre. ‘Journalistic’ is also an adjective that is sometimes used. A lot of the techniques we use and the research, which is a big part of the work that we do, has a journalistic or documentary approach. 

Tell us more about your works and why it is important to be asking these questions now. 

Robert: The title of Albizia takes reference from the name of a tree, which is a common tree in Singapore. It's a tree that is an alien (not native to Singapore) and invasive species. I think it's considered invasive because the wind can disperse its seeds over great distances and it grows very fast. The trees are considered dangerous because during the monsoon they fall easily, so we've been actively trying to remove them.  

But they are also very beautiful trees. They grow 1.3 metres a year, one of the fastest growing in the world, and they become very useful habitats for nonhuman life. Through them secondary forests can spring up in Singapore in less than 10 years. So I guess I’m looking at these spaces that spring up naturally—as a sign of the future. 

Hannes: All three works (in the trilogy) come out of an interest in resources and the use of resources. Everything around us comes from somewhere, and often this ‘somewhere’ is not very clear or transparent. 

We show the backdrop of resources and where they come from, and what impact extracting the resources has had on the landscape. In Mining Stories, it's iron extraction in the south of Brazil where Silke was born and grew up. (It was the site of the country’s worst environmental disaster where a burst dam released toxic waste that killed 19 people and made thousands homeless.) 

 

In the case of Pleasant Island, it's about phosphate, and the history of phosphate mining in the Pacific. In Out of the Blue, it's Belgium, where we live now and it's about the future of mining. What will be the possible future of mining and going to the deep sea to extract resources for batteries and metals? 

Our interconnectedness: systems, nature, culture

Silke and Hannes, your works are set in places that may seem remote to Asian and European audiences. Why should we care, even if we have never been to Brazil or the Pacific Islands? 

Silke: I think we are all connected with these places in one way or another, because the resources we use are coming from these places. But it started with a personal link—that in 2015, a big mining disaster happened in the village where I grew up. 

And here in Belgium, there was almost no news about it. I mean, there are many companies from Europe or from Australia who are investing in faraway mining companies, so we are connected actually. That's when I had the feeling that it can be interesting to bring this story into Europe and beyond.  

Hannes: For example, the banks investing in the mining company in Brazil were European banks. Eventually the iron goes to car manufacturers in France and Japan. So I think the idea of places being completely isolated is not something that that exists anymore today. 

Robert, conversely, trees are right in our backyard, yet are something people take for granted. Why do they matter? 

Robert: We all know trees, but we don't see trees, especially in Singapore. We are very green, very ‘planted’. I think precisely because trees are so visible, you don’t think of or see them, although they're huge—it's so easy to see the building behind than to see the large tree in front of it. 

My interest in ecological themes started from a childhood, (and later lifelong,) fascination with animals and wildlife. My earlier practice explored the zoological gaze, which is how humans view, categorise, ‘other’ and control nature. So my work subverted and played with frameworks and narratives established by natural histories, colonial histories, nation-building, agriculture, science and so on.

Lately, I’ve become more interested in the complex and co-mingled relationships between nature and culture. I want to pay attention to the beings and objects that constitute the living world—like trees—whose experiences and knowledge enrich our collective existence, and see what we can learn from their ways of being and living.  

Rolling cameras and footages

There is a saying, ‘The camera never lies’. How do you explore this and play with it? At which point does the documentation become art?  

Robert: I love documentaries like (Mindaugas Survila’s) The Ancient Woods, which is basically 1.5 hours of high-def footage of the forest creatures without any commentary. On the other end, we have Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man which gives full attention to the subject and also brings something of the soul and insight of the filmmaker. 

Albizia features a lot of documentary footage of secondary forests that have been captured by camera traps, which are only triggered by movement. I’ve placed these camera traps in forests for many years to see what happens in the forest when nobody is around.  

I’ve cut the extensive footage into videos, but these videos are only one part of a larger experience that combines photography, installation, sculpture and a fictional narrative I developed with playwright Joel Tan. So I wouldn’t say I’m working in documentary per se, but it is one element in a complex whole.

Silke and Hannes, your work uses a lot of rolling footages too, like verbatim recordings from interviews. Why capture these footages for the theatre?

Hannes: Generally, audio is more important than images in in our work. In a way, it's a reflection of who we are and what we like to do. We talk to a lot of people and hear a lot of different perspectives, and then bring them together on a theatre stage. 

We started out with theatre and just experimenting with documentary as one of the elements. In the end, it ended up taking over everything and the theatre kind of receded into the background. 

To go further with what Robert just said, there's this aura of objectivity that hangs around documenting something. In our work, we tried to do the exact opposite and show that it's very subjective. 

In all three pieces, you can see how onstage we manipulate the documentation and cut it and put it back together in different contexts. You can see us live on stage performing the editing, which in a conventional documentary, happens in the editing room, but we use it as the performative element.  

That’s why it’s a theatre piece and not a documentary film. We use our bodies in a way to show how it’s Silke and Hannes who are constructing the narrative, and it's a very subjective proposal. This is not the truth, but it's one truth among millions of others of truths that exist. 

Storytelling and editing

So each performance is different in terms of how you ‘edit’ at a given moment? 

Silke: The dramaturgy is quite fixed, but the rhythm is always different every night, yeah.  

Hannes: In Pleasant Island we use our personal smartphones and you can see how we press ‘play’ and ‘pause’ and go into different folders and show images of our personal registration. 

And in Out of the Blue, it's our personal laptops that we use as a way of unfolding a kind of subjective archives to the audience, looking at it together. 

In a way there’s a funny evolution which we were not conscious of. In the first piece, it’s Silke alone, facing the audience (and controlling the audio recordings). In the second piece, it's us looking at our smartphones, and then the third piece, we’re with our backs to the audience. 

The order by which they encounter these stations isn’t all that important. But the experience cannot be completely unstructured so people are lost or clustered in one location all the time. So I’m working with my lighting and sound designers to structure the show, demarcate space and time, so that people are guided to pay attention to certain areas at different times. 

How would you like audiences to remember your works? 

Robert: As images that evoke a certain feeling, a sort of openness to the mysteries of the world. 

Hannes: The mining company that was later held responsible for the disaster in Brazil released a huge PR campaign and the slogan was, “It's always good to look at the story from different perspectives”. It was their way of pulling the public narrative to their side and highlighting their side of the story. 

In a way this became the trigger to make Mining Stories, to say, “Ok, we're going to do exactly that. We're going look at the story from different perspectives” And I think that connects all three pieces—showing one thing from very different sides, which often are in conflict with each other, but that does not make one less true or more true.

It's a way of trying to show the complexity that lies beneath. 

Mining Stories, Pleasant Island, and Out of the Blue, three parts of The Mining Trilogy by Silke Huysmans and Hannes Dereere will be showing 28 July - 6 August 2023 at Esplanade Theatre Studio. Albizia – An Immersive Performance Installation by Robert Zhao Renhui will be showing at the Esplanade Theatre Studio from 31 August - 3 September 2023. Both programmes are part of The Studios 2023.