Ruinart Maison, the world’s oldest champagne house, is literally embedded in the land. With its UNESCO World Heritage site cellars, dug 38 meters into Cretaceous period chalk, the Maison’s store of hundreds of thousands of the region’s finest champagne occupies an underground maze below the city of Rheimes. Above, the house is rooted just as firmly on the grounds of its historic vineyards Sillery and Taissy. The champagne region’s Chardonnay vines are fragile— varying temperatures in either direction affect the harvest quality— requiring special care of the soil and surrounding biodiversity. Deeply dependent on the quality of their grapes, Ruinart must adapt to variations in the vinyeard’s microsystem— necessitating research, monitoring, and constant planning of the vines and the distillation process to ensure that their champagne maintains its elite reputation. Their interests as a business and cultural institution have cohered in a committment to sustainability and fighting climate change, a mission they have pursued through the running Carte Blanche artist residency project.
This year’s Carte Blanche featured six different artists in “Conversations with Nature”, including our interviewee Thijs Biersteker. The project aimed to raise awareness about climate change and to bring audiences closer to nature, through different artistic mediums. Biersteker is celebrated for his artistic contributions to climate activism— from projects displayed for public policy makers to museum and gallery installations accross the globe. His Xylemia is on display at AM TACHELES, a living sculpture made from sensors that show the sap movements through a tree in real time. The installation draws paralells between the structures of plantlife and our human circulatory system. Working closely with scientific researchers and the Maison’s master of cellars, Biersteker imagined a project that would help audiences realize the closeness of natural systems to our own bodies— that trees drink, breath, and grow much like humans. In our interview, Biersteker described the motives and inspiration behind his work, his experience at the Maison, and his project for their current Carte Blanche.
Images courtesy of Ruinart.
SLEEK: Your artwork at Ruinart’s Carte Blanche is a living sculpture that shows the rate and flow of sap through a tree, using sensors and lights to mimic the pathways sap finds through the trunk. Why did you pick this element of the plantlife to show— the sap?
Thijs Biersteker: I work a lot with trees as a metaphor to communicate not only the climate change and the biodiversity loss that’s going on, but also how they reflect society. When you can see how much tree is drinking in real time, how much goes through a tree, like an X-ray machine, that’s the moment you can relate to it. The correlation between our own blood vessels and that of a tree becomes really clear. You get this mirroring effect.
I believe when you have this reflective effect, that’s the reason that you start caring about it and that you protect it more. It is so relatable and understandable. You can see that trees react the same as us when we need to drink, when we don’t drink enough, when it’s too hot. And the building of that relationship between us and nature can be done by sensors and by data really easily.
S: Many of your artworks have a similar “living” quality— why are the themes of fluctuation and movement so recurrent in your work?
TB: The work I do is about climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution, pretty heavy topics. The issue with these topics is that these days they work in an alienating way: climate anxiety, headlines that shock you, horrible images. You get numb by the numbers. The moment you encounter these issues, you close yourself off from them. That’s a natural response.
I tried to figure out how I can provoke ways to start that conversation that makes you ease into these horrible issues. That doesn’t alienate you. That make it personal, understandable, and relatable in ways that headlines or scientific papers mostly are not doing anymore. I structure all my work to make it mirror us as much as possible. Making it look like a living being, making it feel like a living organism, making it reflect the blood flow and the sap flow, so you can relate to it better as a human being.
S: Some of your artwork is political motivated, with direct messages about the urgency of voting for sustainable solutions to energy consumption and the growth of modern infrastructure. Why do you think your artwork is especially effective at imparting this message?
TB: I want my work to live between science communication, climate communication and art. I think art itself has lost its communication function. Cave art, for example, was just data visualization: what animals are outside, what are the years that they’re mating, and what time can you hunt or not?
Then we skipped ahead a few years where the church was communicating a story through visual language. It has always been a communication vessel, until it became this era of egocentric white men talking about their abstract stuff. I think we are moving back now to position the artist as a translator or as a partner to communicate what is reflected in society.
The work I make is awareness art. It makes people aware about this issue by making it tangible and understandable and approachable. When I stand at a Unesco conference with an art piece, we meet the biggest policy makers and activists in the world, from the King of Cambodia to Natalie Portman. They come there and they take it in and we discuss it with them. So I think the soft politics powers of the artworks that I make is pretty big.
Image courtesy of Ruinart.
S: What is the relationship between the data you use for your works and your creative process? Do you usually come up with a concept for a project and then look for the data to support it, or the other way around? Or does the process happen more spontaneously, that the structure of the work is shaped by the data as you continue to do research?
TB: A lot of the inspiration is frustration, of course. Like: “Why don’t I know this? How does the world not know this? How is there this disconnect?” Sometimes institutions come to me for help getting work out. Sometimes it’s me reading a research paper and thinking like “how is that possible?” Sometimes it’s working together with the scientist and going through the facts and pin pointing it out.
At the Maison the head of cellars invited me to go to dinner and showed up with a pack of 40 pages about how climate change was impacting the growth of champagne. I’m a data freak. I’m thought, okay, this is cool, but this is not what I had anticipated. Then we started to talk about how drought in the champagne areas is affecting the soil structure and the moisture levels. At that moment— because he was a scientist in that sense— we start to speak the same language. I realized I knew what I wanted to communicate. It’s all about the transportation of liquids.
S: You generally work with researchers and scientists; what was it like to collaborate with other artists for the Carte Blanche? Was there much interchange between your projects?
TB: I work together with scientists all the time. It’s my specialty— to translate their facts into these art installations. I never work together with other artists. I guess that’s because for me, the purity of the idea gets conflicted. But it’s really nice that they’ve put together a group where it felt natural, because we are all talking about the natural world. You understand that there is a common thread through our works. And there was a mutual respect to the works.
S: Many of your artworks are interactive: not just meant to be looked at, but also played and communicated with. What led you in this direction for some of your projects, like the Fungal Faculty?
TB: My goal is to build a relationship with humans and be an intermediary, someone who is in between the science and the humans. There’s really subtle things that we as humans do to mirror each other, to communicate, and I like to embed that in my artworks. The moment you create the relationship, by having sensors following your outline— how you’re sitting or touching things, or reacting to your breath or your heartbeat. You take away these boundaries between the hardcore, brutal science, by making it as accessible as possible. I think, through the work for Ruinart, you can see how something is drinking in real time, that makes the relationship immediately clear.
Image courtesy of Ruinart.
S: You’ve also spoken a lot about AI, and how it has lended to the living quality of your artwork. What do you think the impact of AI is going to be on the art world?
TB: Technology for me is like paint. I use it as a tool to communicate something. So if it’s an AI or Jason script, or if it’s leaves that disappear, or it’s a sub flow, I use that as a communication tool. I would never call myself an AI artist or a sensor artist. I use the tools, I like them because it’s interesting.
What I really like about programing things— generative pieces, thing that are reacting in real time— is that it becomes its own living being. I can also go there and it’s not as boring. It would be so horrible to go to your painting. Like “Yeah, I made that, and it’s still the same.” It’s nice to see things that are living. It reacts and you feel more attached to it.
S: Many of your projects are also focused on the future of climate change and sustainability. How do you envision the work of others will be inspired by your own, and what is your vision of the future of sustainability?
TB: With knowledge comes responsibility. Going back to the discussion I had with Frederick, the head of cellars: every tool they develop to protect this really expensive crop is some knowledge that can be expanded. If you look at the champagne area, they have so much research on that one slot of land: about what is growing, how fast it’s growing, what’s the weather patterns, what are the predictions? The rest of the world will need these tools to predict the success of their crop growth, of their biodiversity health, of all those elements. Then we can act on it.
I think my job is to translate that into human language. Something that humans can feel and act on. I think that is the the biggest challenge of our time right now, because I don’t believe that we’re in a climate crisis or biodiversity crisis, we’re in a communication crisis.
S: At Ruinart you also spent time in the vineyard, walking through the plantlike and harvesting grapes. How did this experience impact your artwork for Carte Blanche?
TB: Being in the field, being in a production that cares about the same values as I do, was very soothing. Normally when you walk a field, you walk in a monoculture. Here it was rich in biodiversity, and it was interesting to talk with people who tried to push that more and more. The intention was reflected in what I saw while harvesting. Spending time with trees, even their tiny trees or fruit trees or wine grapes, it’s cool. I just like to spend time outdoors.
It was also good to talk to the wine makers, the ones who did the harvest. They depend on it, they take climate change in account. They try to bring biodiversity and soil health into the vineyards, which is a break with tradition. Normally it used to be as clean as possible. Now they plant certain areas with biodiversity hotspots so it will spread. The soil resilience goes up, meaning less pesticides. They are acknowledging that there’s change happening and they adapting to it, which is a good strategy. Instead of just ignoring it.