Nest x Atelier Rijksbouwmeester

Commissioned by Rijksbouwmeester, Nest will present six solo exhibitions in the DICTU building over the next four years. Six different solo exhibitions will be presented in the completely glass-walled courtyard of the ICT Implementation Service for four years from 2023. A curator, in agreement with DICTU employees, will invite an artist every eight months to develop new work for this special location. The Inner Garden is not publicly accessible to visitors, but because the enclosure of the space is glass, it is possible to view it from outside day and night.

The Inner Garden is located in a special place in the city. The green oasis is surrounded by asphalt and concrete. Underneath the building, cars race across the A12 motorway. With Central Station just a stone's throw away, the bridge building is surrounded by ministries and office buildings. This environment makes the courtyard an absurdist work of art in itself. The art programme seeks ways in which this piece of artificial nature is elevated or emphasised by artist interventions.

#1 Oscar Santillán - TREELEMMA
The first artist is Oscar Santillán. With a group of experts using various technologies, including blockchain, A.I. and different programming languages, he developed TREELEMMA. The artwork builds a bridge between global climate problems and the exploding potential of new technologies.

Every time a forest fire rages somewhere on Earth, it is registered by satellites. Those satellites transmit data to a pre-trained A.I. system with the instruction to write a poem for this dying forest. The poems are converted into digital animations and displayed in real-time on screens in The Inner Garden. Each new poem means a new forest fire, somewhere on earth.

Each animation of a poem is converted into an NFT (a unique file stored in the blockchain). Since this kind of technology cannot be arbitrarily deleted, each poem commemorating a forest fire is recorded as a permanent obituary. The NFTs will contain a unique A.I.-generated poem; in addition, the location and date of the fire will be accessible to all in the metadata of the NFT.

The TREELEMMA series currently runs throughout 2023, from 1 January to 31 December. So this project will work as a calendar of our ongoing climate catastrophe.

Oscar Santillán's TREELEMMA exhibition is the first in a series of six solo presentations at The Inner Garden, and is curated by Daphne Verberg. The exhibitions are the result of a collaboration between Atelier Rijksbouwmeester and Nest.

Please note that this exhibition will not take place at Nest, but at Dienst ICT Uitvoering (DICTU) in The Hague. The building is located at Juliana van Stolberglaan 10 in The Hague, but is unfortunately not open to the public.