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It was the fifth weekend of Kaap 2011. I was quite curious to know how my work, Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Fort Ruigenhoek, has grown. The work is a process-based installation of growing flowers in the shape of the world map, taken care by the audience, and recorded continuously with a 24-hours security camera. In the fifth weekend, the weekend before the closing week, I went back to the Fort Ruigenhoek to give the flowers away.
Kaap started as a biennial for children. Now it’s not a biennial anymore, but it’s still geared pretty much towards children.

I was here for the opening, but didn’t get the chance to take a picture of their pirate flag. This time, I did.

As I walked to my site I realized the Stinging Nettles have grown quite a lot. I can still see my watchtower, though, in the background.
I discovered that the production team, Mark, Frank and all the wizards, has built some kind of an underground system for watering the plants. It’s wonderful.
In the control room, I found a lot of new friends. The spiders! They were not there when I left the last time, after the opening of the exhibition. I wonder where they were hiding.
This is something that I didn’t think of before. When the team told me about the changes that were happening in the work, of course they sounded really obvious. But honestly when I worked with Google SketchUp in my computer, thinking about the work and planning on what it will be like and what it will grow into, this kind of things didn’t really occur to me. This feels great – to see something you think as your own creation, working somewhat out of your control, creating life of its own. Maybe this is what having kids can feel like.
And as part of just the simplest course of life, America totally became a wild wild grassland.
The plan was to devise some kind of a competitive game where the winners can take the flowers home. When I arrived at the site, however, I thought making a game didn’t make sense. It would just add yet another layer that I felt was not necessary. So I just started to talk to the audience and tell them that they can get any flowerpots they want and take care of them at home.
This is another example of how the work has been growing. I saw this for the first time when I was preparing the work: the site became a recreation ground for insects. Butterflies and bees were ecstatic. They just couldn’t get away. I was so happy.
A toddler came, and of course the ‘world map’ didn’t mean anything to her. Her parents were just walking behind her, and sat to watch her. She picked up a flowerpot, took it to her dad, and made him smell it.
She did this repeatedly, with different flowers. And also with her mum. When she finally got bored of it, she started picking up the flowerpots, taking them away to a bench nearby, and leaving them there to pick up a new one. And so on. She had so much fun, I did too.
It was not easy to decide which flowers to take home.
Being there was worth it. It enabled me to play more with some of the audience. Some people decided to mix the colours again.
I suggested trying to build a red line across Asia, but while we were doing it someone else was sneakily making a yellow line across America, and the yellow line was much more visible in the camera.
This is what Egypt looked like. The wild purple flowers were victorious.
The next day, America was almost gone.
One of the kids reminded me of Le Petit Prince himself.
And funnily contextual enough, I discovered a few mole holes beneath the pots.
The Busy Lizzies were all eaten away by slugs.
The slugs apparently only came out at night.
At the end of the day, we moved the rest of the flowers that were not taken home by the visitors to the nearby bench, leaving the wild long grass marking where the continents used to be.
A little bit further away I discovered where the moles might have been coming from.
Without the flowerpots, the slugs and the worms were exposed. This invited a different kind of visitors.
The security camera in the watchtower kept recording.

Nous ne notons pas les fleurs, Fort Ruigenhoek is commissioned by Kaap 2011/Stichting Storm. Images courtesy of the artist and of Alexander Fasel/Stichting Storm