The Hanged Man - single channel video installation, shagbark hickory nuts. 7 minutes, 2024.

The first in a series, this work touches on the surface of times: personal, familial, cultural, national, geological, animal, vegetal and cosmic times are all deeply entangled and woven into our bodies, perceptions, senses, and memories. For me, the work is a mediation on these layers and is a metaphor for the incessant, cyclical, procreative act of all organic beings on this planet as well as the energetic pelvic thrust of civilization and technological advancement.

I feel like a lot of the work hangs in the balance between movement and suspension, as is the case with fruits hanging from a tree, the feeling of change is at work in these pieces. There is a feeling of a before and an after, a feeling of light and shadow, up and down, speech and silence, movement and suspension, the work also takes on the language of chance, divination, and evolution.

A video artwork initiated by Nathaniel Hendrickson in collaboration with Gianluigi Biagini made in residence on Le Ventre De La Baleine near Montagne Saint-Pierre in collaboration with Projet Daena for the occasion of the International Seminar, Borderscapes II. Initiated by ULiege School of Architecture. The video was screened at Farm Caestert on June 26, 2023. Official selection: West Virginia Mountaineer Film Festival, in the experimental film category, 2024

This work is one of a series of works that I am calling minor-drawings. By using a drone as a drawing instrument and tool for poetic abstraction, I am perhaps working in the lineage of Jean Luc Nancy from The Pleasure in Drawing (which echoes Merleau-Ponty’s Eye and Mind) where he says that “Drawing is the opening of form… drawing evokes more the gesture of drawing than the traced figure… it indicates the figure’s essential incompleteness, a non-closure or non-totalizing form.” This work thus proposes a use of the drone in opposition to its current use as a weaponized mapping technology and tool for ever-increasing “traced figure(s)” which lead to ever-increasing surveillance and subdivision of lands and hyper-extractionist capitalist campaigns (see James Bridle’s Ways of Being, p.27), The slow, droning, digital hum of the video invites an embodied experience of place, close to that of walking in the landscape, or as though one might be perceiving, as in a dream, the sounds as perceived by a fish in the canal or from the point of view of a bird in the air. I chose the stills from the video above because I feel that they both speak to the “traces” left behind by the singular footsteps of extraction and highlight the ecocritical gaze of the work as a whole. These singular gestures (the scars of a mountain cut in two, or the diagonal path of a boat full of scrap metal) resist a totalizing, omniscient image or mapping out of the frontier as a whole but rather edge toward the “multiform, resistant, tricky and stubborn procedures (like everyday practices of walking) that elude discipline” (see Michel de Certeau’s Walking in the City, p. 161). These non-totalizing compositions draw the perceptions toward an embodied experience of place and the unfolding poetics of singular experiences that create a horizontal relationship between human perceptions and animal perception and emphasize incomplete individual gestures over totalizing maps, enclosures, and sub-dividual borders.

How To Become A Plant is a collective creation made on a rainy day in residence on Le Ventre De La Baleine near Kanne, Belgium. A collaboration of Blanche Delhausse, Clément Corrillon, Clara Wielick, Marion Eudes, Mathilde Marsan, Maëlle Marsan, Nicholas Arancibia, Fanchon Lefevre, Fanny Heinen and Pietro Varrasso. Made for the occasion of International Workshop BORDERSCAPE hosted by ULiège School of Architecture focusing on the unique geographical border region of Montagne St. Pierre | 26-30 June + 1 July 2023.

BODY LANDSCAPE is a practice of putting the body in the landscape and observing its objective relationship with the cultivated earth. This particular manifestation of the practice was created for the International Seminar BORDERSCAPES, Organized by Rita Occiuto and Pietro Varrasso, focusing on the unique border region of Mountain St. Pierre. A collaboration with Blanche Delhausse, Clément Corrillon, Clara Wielick, Marion Eudes, Mathilde Marsan, Maëlle Marsan, Nicholas Arancibia, Fanchon Lefevre, Fanny Heinen and Pietro Varrasso.

Soiled Dreams is a video meeting and improvisation lamenting the death of science made on a sunny afternoon in residence at The Soil Factory, Ithaca on the site of The Marshy Garden, a future food forest and possible carbon sequestration project.

CONTACT ZONE is an essay performance-intervention on, about, beside, around, overlapped, near and counter Donna Haraway's essay "Where the species meet". It is composed by a first part that is a surrealist cut-up created by the artist with a bunch of labradors in an immanent "becoming-with"; a second part where the protagonist trains to become-labrador with different techniques and a third de-constructive-re-constructive critique that puts into light the dark bio-political dimension of biocapitalism to form an impure superposition of many planes. The artistic approach is not ideological but feels and problematically elaborates Haraway's "contact zone" in its multidimensional "natureculture" impurity. In the "contact zone" Marx's transcendent commodification (exchange value and use value) meets the immanent "encounter value" that unmakes any transcendent judgment. An ambiguous zone of feeling is triggered that anticipates language, categories of sense and cognitive definitions. The artist encounters a bunch of playful labradors so much as Haraway's book does. The whole event is not only a place for interspecies meeting but also for literary commentaries and artistic derives. Haraway's book becomes a material art object with signs of bites and torn pages scattered all over in pieces; some pages eaten with obsessive rage and some licked with aimless love . It is a spinning tour de force of many dimensions, intensities and meta-dimensions in play. The artist (that calls himself Anartist) becomes part of an indefinite and creative "contact assemblage" with the potentiality to unleash a humanimal performing expression that can overcome art as a too much anthropocentric human affair. Is this humanimal performing assemblage a new path for the artistic vanguard? Does a new humanimal territory is open for the artistic research? Concept and performance by Gian Luigi Biagini, direction and cinematography by Nathaniel Hendrickson. The video was shown in DIVENIRE ANIMALE, an exhibition held in Grosseto's Galleria Medicea 15 July-15 August 2022. The exhibition is part of the wider research project Humanimal Community Art Project.

Collaboration with Douglas Lucas, featuring video shot entirely in 2-week mandatory quarantine in a hotel room in Seoul, Korea, 2020.

A short documentary in english and french directed by Nathaniel Hendrickson about a 5 week encounter in para-theatrical research on a farm near a forest in Nannine, Belgium. A group of 7 theatre students from the Royal Conservatory of Liege, led by artist and pedagogue Pietro Varrasso and visual artist and actor/director Nathaniel Hendrickson, respond to the call of David Abram, who says that the ecological crisis starts with and is fundamentally linked to a crisis of perception. A production of Project Daena.