Back to the Future Great Fens (location : Great Fens, Nature Reserve, Holme, north of Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom) 2011 Great Fens, located between Peterborough in the north and Cambridge in the south, are a very particular region. Originally covered with moors and marshes, this area was turned, during the XIXth century, into a new cultivated land by mankind. Indeed at that time the local authorities decided to call in dutch engineers, famous water-specialists, to transform these unsuited to farming territories into polders. Today and because of the increasing new interest for ecology, people are thinking differently and a lot have even more consideration for Nature than for the obligation to “make grow always more”. The advocates of a submissive nature by mankind have once and for all lost their fight. That era is definitely in the past. Indeed posterity show us how much the alterations of certain places can lead to unexpected and dramatic consequences. So with the passing years the marshes draining has completely changed the soil flatness. Like for the wellknown “Phlegrean Fiels” closed to Pozzuoli in the volcanic Napoli area in Italy, the “bradisism effect” has considerably altered the soil levels; some going up now a few yards higher than normally making the fields developing always harder; the more speaking example is certainly Wittlesey Mere upon which the XIXth local public went in summer for boating and in winter for ice skating. Today the most part of the usable water surface has completely disappeared. The only trace of these happy times is an old engraving made in 1842. In the way of this next site restoration my sculpture project called back to the future represents a visible metaphor easily understood by a public as large as possible.
PROJECT |
Location : Materials : Base building : Sculpture sizes : Photographic trace for travelling exhibitions : |