Part of the atelierWG series

In his film KALI WAAL and the accompanying spatial installation, Jasper Coppes shares the outcome of a long term collaboration around a controversial sand quarry lake in the Netherlands.

A group of foreign researchers visits a site of ecological controversy and learns of the strange events that are happening to the lake and its human and non-human inhabitants. Can the natural reserve be healed with toxic mud as industries claim?

In the short film KALI WAAL, landscape design is both poison and remedy. A nature reserve in the Netherlands is the setting for an ecological controversy. Decades of industrial sand extraction created lakes so deep that no light can reach the bottom. The lakes have seemingly become lifeless pools of water. Industries recently started to dump contaminated mud in these lakes, claiming that such undeepening will increase the biodiversity. A group of young researchers gradually discovers that this landscape is neither an innocent rewilding project, nor an ecological dead-end. As resilient forms of life take center stage a new ecology of plants, alga, animals, and machines increasingly takes over the film.

Fiction as Resistance: Jasper Coppes in conversation with Mira Sys

On Saturday 27 July at 17:00 exhibiting artist Jasper Coppes opens the doors of puntWG for a public talk about the research behind his film. He will have a conversation with journalist and writer Mira Sys, whose research into contaminated lakes was the key inspiration for KALI WAAL. Jasper and Mira invite you to join the conversation and explore the ways in which fiction and environmental justice might go hand in hand.