Trans Human Nature

Trans Human Nature is the story of a personal traversal and an artistic exploration that Anouk Kruithof made in and around Botopasi, a small village in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in Suriname that is only connected to civilization through the Suriname river. In this village she works in symbiosis with nature and the population. Settling her practice in this context had an impact on what she was producing there, or rather what was being produced there.

Kruithof takes prints (made on fabrics, organic silk or pvc plastics) of her collection of digital stock photos representing our technological future aboard aboard the pirogues (dugout canoes) that connect the village to the outside world, takes them on forest hikes, immerses them in the river and hides them in the greenery, while observing their capacity to becoming one with a wild, powerful and sometimes also violent nature. The images she produces then come to relate a self-transformative process through the contact with a dense and tropical nature. What happens to becoming stone, to becoming plant?

What happens to these hypnotic experiences in which we dilate our pores and our thoughts? Between fascination and fantasy, we trail the artist’s attempts to come closer, to hybridize wild nature and to produce there an aqueous, liquid surface reflecting our humanity. The vegetal and natural materials intertwine with the faces of transhumanism, distorts them, covers them, multiplies folds and reflections to project onto it mutant, blurred and fertile identities. She explores the myth of a hybridized, polyphonic and harmonious nature, which we would like to visit ourselves to lay out there our own fantasies of transformation for the self and for others.

Concept, photography, editing: Anouk Kruithof

Book concept & design: Doris Boerman & Anouk Kruithof

Text: Mathilde Roman

Quote page 96: Jeanette Winterson

Documentation photography exhibitions: Niccolo Quaresima, Salim Santa Lucia, Gretar Gunnlaugsson

Edition of 500