To Be a Work Means to Set Up a World: Into the Woods with Heidegger

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by Falk Heinrich with Thomas Wolsing This video article is one result of my collaboration with The Danish artist Thomas Wolsing.
An academic analysis and contextualization of this experiment can be found in my written article 'Into the Woods with Heidegger' (Heinrich, 2018).
Here is Thomas Wolsing and his red car and … he is the artist and is taking a lot of plant pots out of his car. Yes, this is a pilot project I, and we are commencing it here. The purpose of this project is to initiate a collaboration between an artist, Thomas, and a scholar, that would be me, aimed at the creation of an artwork and an academic presentation. Exciting. We have begun our collaboration a bit late, meaning that the founding concept of the artwork has been done by Thomas. I  We have to put these pots in this area over there. We should put each beside a fern. It is like that, that, my idea for this project was that Gateway, Blokhus, Hune, a beautiful area with summer cottages. Obviously, this is an industrial, planted forest, but we call it nature.

Det er det, vi prøver at lave nu faktisk.
It is so that this Landshape festival is situated in a beautiful surrounding.
It is a recreational area, where tourists like to come, and that is why they wanted to be here -the festival. And furthermore, I am very fascinated by these ferns here, and moss. Moss and ferns were the first plants on the earth -from the origin of life. When you look at a fern like this one, as long as it is planted in the earth, is it termed nature, but when it is in a pot, is it called culture, part of civilisation. That is why I thought what we will do is dig up the ferns, plant them in the pots, widen the hole in the ground and put the pots into them. When we do this at many spots, it can provoke the public's curiosity -yes -that is to say, something is happening here, something different. Let us continue with this idea.

Heinrich: To Be a Work Means to Set Up a World 8
And we do not know whether the pot is coming out of the earth. [Thomas Wolsing:] Lige praecis. Precisely.
… or whether, it is put into the earth.
So, nature is human-made, at the border of nature and civilisation. I think that is interesting and I was thinking of working with this in the project.
Are you happy with the placement now, or? [Thomas Wolsing:] Jeg er ikke sikker.
I am not entirely sure. Already now there is a space that is distinguished from the surroundings, from the other spaces of the forest. Merely the assembly of these pots here points at and points out a place that is different in one or another way. [Thomas Wolsing:] Jeg kunne godt taenke mig, at prøve …. det er lidt fristende, at grave en op og så se.
Let us try to -it is tempting to dig one up.
[ The only thing that is strange is the pot. And pot signifies culture. How one cultivates …. Hm yea. But when we are in our gardens, we have a lot of pots, at least many have, but one experiences them not as culture, but more as… also as nature, as something that is different than the city and urban space that has another logic and atmosphere. [Thomas Wolsing:] Det er spaendende, det der. Hvordan starter civilisationen, starter det et sted,

ik'os', en kultivering af et område her.
It is quite exciting, when there begins -civilisation or when begins this site -a cultivation of this environment.  (Heidegger, 1994, p. 54). Han [Heidegger]   Now, I am here again and I want to see what Thomas has done yesterday and the day before. I wasn't here, I could not. He has made a wooden construction with tiles under it. This appears to be a terrace. And then, here, one can see -I think this will be the outline of the house. Now, I am a bit … I do not really know which paragraph would be fitting. Maybe we should just read a bit, again, something with earth, which I find very interesting. "The work lets the earth be an earth." He (Heidegger) has this opposition between world and earth and earth is the covered, the hidden, one cannot say something about.
"Earth is essentially self-secluding. To set forth the earth means to bring it into the open region as the self-secluding." (Heidegger, 1993:172) Earth is also a movement, it's not the material we are talking about here -moss, soil, etc. -but earth is also a symbol of something that hides, that does not want to be identified. And if you want to present earth, you will also have to present that earth does not want to be presented as something. It's a movement of disclosure, all the time. Here, we have the world of the house, of a house that will be built -also if you build a house in decay, it is built after all it constructs a world, the world we live in, the comprehensive world we live in -and then there is the forest floor, earth, that we do not know.
Yes, we know it in a biological sense, chemical and this kind, of course. But nevertheless, there is always something that gets hidden, that is closed off, a secret. The dark, not a dark force, but something we do not have access to.
We only have access to it when it surfaces. And then we have the earth: "The work lets the earth be an earth." "The work lets the earth be an earth." "The work lets the earth be an earth." "The work lets the earth be an earth." "The work lets the earth be an earth." [Black] That what we do not know, undisclosed at all times, it has not yet opened itself, it hides, conceals itself. Maybe that is what I am doing here, I venture into something that seems so stupid and I also feel quite stupid going around here in an artwork that yet is not, a work of art to-be, an artwork that creates a world, represents a world while I am talking to myself with the intention to combine it with Heidegger's elevated thoughts about the work of art that sets up a world and lets the earth be earth. And I expose myself, I expose myself due to my ignorance and inability to combine these two things: philosophy, theory, language and … this here.
[ The world of philosophy lives with the ephemeral, the notional and gains meaning within its own notional system. He talks about world and earth, and things and equipment and things like this. One has to enter, go into this world and live there, breath there in order to be able to extract meaning. The work of art, or rather, to work on or install something, to take those pots and carry them that is … that is very … it's the body working, carrying something, feeling the forest ground. There aren't any elevated thoughts. Philosophical thoughts do not make sense here. In any case this relationship is not very clear to me, I feel like … [Falk Heinrich:] Det bliver en terrasse, en traeterrasse.
It is going to be terrace. A wooden terrace. This is the closest relation between practical building work and one core sentence of Heidegger's philosophy of the work of art, I have experienced. This is my human earth, where pure but blind energy amalgamates with joy, sorrow, movement, sense, breathing, indoctrination to form my perception of this work of art to-be and to create my world. [Black]