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 investigates the various mountain environments. She investigates whether the speed at which the clouds pass by in the morning has an influence on the course of the rest of the day, compiles colour maps of geological formations in sunken roads, captures sounds with which the wind chases the light through the fluttering elms, chases glassmakers and variable damselflies in a fossil river valley, copies the meandering Demer line step by step until evening falls, and investigates the darkness of the night in the only Berg that is located in a valley.

To unravel potential escape routes and make them known to the world, the help of a Reed Player, a Pianist and a Writer is called upon.

The project focuses on connection – between people, between landscapes and between nine villages, which at first glance have nothing in common other than their name. By thinking back and forth across the boundaries of disciplines while making, walking, speaking, silently and playing, an attempt is made to create a kaleidoscopic image that does justice to the fragility, intensity and layering of the natural environment of which we are (no more than) a part.

Berg started with one word and fanned out into a collective trajectory. Via retrospective intersections and a sailing trip that started in the 1930s, the expedition gradually also became a study of the duration between different points in time.