The Day You Where Thinking About the Sibyl While You Were Picking Autumn Leaves, 2020-2025

Even though my work is very visual, text has always played a major role in it, whether it is self-written text or pre-existing texts I reuse, often in the form of fragments or collages. It is no wonder then that I’m attracted to textile. The words text and textile are both derived from the Latin verb texere, meaning to weave. It implies that weaving preceded writing, and that the first writers saw themselves as weavers. In The Elements of Typographic Style (1992), Robert Bringhurst writes: ‘An ancient metaphor: Thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns-but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver.’(1)

The Sibyl in the title of this work refers primarily to the Sibyl of Cumae, a female prophet from classical antiquity who lived in a cave. She wrote her prophecies on fallen leaves, which were scattered by the slightest breeze. During that strange summer of 2020, when a virus had the entire world in its grip, I reread Virgil’s Aeneid, in which she plays a major role, and I was struck by the fact that of the Sibyl of Cumae’s many prophecies, only enigmatic fragments remained, because she did not gather the leaves back together to reconstruct the original prophecy after the wind had scattered them. It struck me as a metaphor for our desire to know the future in a period that now seems almost surreal, and for the futility of that desire.

During the second lockdown, I touched the ground by gathering hundreds of fallen autumn leaves in the woods and parks in my neighbourhood, which I dried between the pages of various national and international newspapers. It is certainly no coincidence that I soon thought of the aforementioned Sibyl of Cumae, who, like the nymph Echo, has since become one of my favourite figures from classical antiquity.

At the time, the dailies were full of charts, often about the COVID-19 pandemic that was raging and spreading at the time; about the presidential election that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won on 7 November 2020, which incumbent president Donald Trump refused to accept, making unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud; about the complexity of migration flows in Africa and Latin America; about Asia’s major river systems at risk because of climate change.

Several weeks later, I photographed all those dried autumn leaves on the newspaper pages on which I had initially put it, a small selection of which formed the basis for twenty-eight textile designs, representing twenty-eight consecutive days or four weeks. I combined the 28 photos with short text notes, which I cut out of leaves of white paper. These notes, anaphoric exercises in brevity, consist of short (autobiographical) bits I wrote myself and found texts about topics that matter to me, which I edited and polished until they felt right.

In English, the word folio refers to a loose sheet of paper or parchment, or to a book composed of such sheets. The Latin root of these words is folium, a noun meaning leaf. Although the English word leaf has a different origin—apparently the Proto-Germanic lauba (also the source of the Dutch loof and the German Laub)—we use related meanings when we leaf through a book. On an etymological level, leaves and paper, and leaves and books, are therefore closely connected.

I wrote a longer text for the publication in the context of my solo exhibition in Vienna in which I show this work for the first time.

1. Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style, Hartley and Marks Publishers, 1992, p. 25
2. Virgil. Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid. Translated by Fairclough, H. R. Loeb Classical Library Volumes 63 & 64. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press. 1916.
3. I dried them between daily bought (inter)national newspapers of that period in 2020, in six different languages (Dutch, French, English, German, Spanish and Italian) and a bi-monthly Dutch_language art newspaper.