Femke Herregraven

The Evacuated (Memory Machines of Sonsbeek), 2026

Site-responsive installation, LED screen with real-time simulation with generative mutations and quadraphonic sound, fed by environmental sensors embedded in tree sculpture (12 m × 4.5 m × 2 m), water sculpture (95 cm × 53 cm × 42 cm), and soil sculpture (135 cm × 140 cm × 195 cm)

The effects of abstract value systems on landscapes, ecosystems, language, historiography, and daily life are critical to Femke Herregraven’s research into the interaction between financial markets, geological forces, and the physical world. The artist examines self-organizing systems, particularly the financialization of the future as catastrophe, through sculptures, drawings, films, and speculative fiction. This newly commissioned installation is modeled after a forest driven by instability, and inspired by a Dutch gene bank forest. A real-time simulation of a forest ecosystem mutates continuously, fed by sensors across the park. Under a title recalling those forced out by disaster, the work shows how the park’s historical structures can become proto-memory machines within an existing ecology of latency and change. The Spicarium (1431), a medieval grain vault, hosts a simulation in which forgetting is a condition of transformation. A dead tree preserved through Yakisugi, the ancient Japanese fire-charring technique, holds wind and light sensors that feed the park’s atmosphere into the work. Adjacent to the ice cellar, which suspended time across the seasons, ground sensors register what lies beneath. Finally, the waterfall, an artificial construction of sublime wildness, becomes a pre-digital rendering engine, proof that simulation precedes the nature it imitates. The sites point to Sonsbeek as Arnhem’s first industrial area (c. 1300–1850)—connected by the Sint Jansbeek stream represented by the park’s Grote Vijver—when the ice cellar (1801) and waterfall (1826) were built. Only visible from a distance, an LED screen in the landscape shows the simulation wherein live data streams overwrite the synthetic forest that never stabilizes, opening the park’s “natural” surface to reveal its layered memories.