Ellen Schroven is currently working on Berg: a landscape expedition, indebted to ‘Pataphysics and anchored in nine Belgian and Dutch villages and hamlets that bear the name ‘Berg’.

Looking, writing, dreaming, drawing and filming, she explores the different mountain environments. She investigates whether the speed at which the clouds slide by in the morning affects the course of the rest of the day, compiles colour maps of geological formations in hollow roads, captures sounds with which the wind chases light through the fluttering reeds, chases glaziers and variable damselflies in a fossil river valley, incrementally copies the meandering Demer line until nightfall, and investigates the darkness of the night in the only Mountain located in a valley.

To unravel potential mountain escape routes and make them worldly, it enlists the help of a Reed Blower, a Pianist, a Philosopher and a Cosmonaut.

Berg focuses on connection: between people, between landscapes and between nine villages, which at first glance have nothing else in common but their names. By thinking back and forth across the boundaries of disciplines while making, walking, speaking, silencing, and playing, an attempt is made to create a kaleidoscopic image that does justice to the fragility, intensity and stratification of the natural environment of which we are (no more than) a part. At best, this polyphony not only leads to a different reflection and imagination of the landscape, but, by extension, also provides us with new insights and ways to constructively help shape the future world itself.

The expedition started from a single word, fanned out into a collective artistic trajectory, and gradually – via retrospective intersections and a sailing trip that started in the 1930s but was never completed – also became a study of the duration between different points in time.