Between the Lines

Still from ‘Between the Lines,’ Marjolijn Dijkman, 2024-2025

Between the Lines is a sound and film installation featuring an orchestra of robotic drummers playing trunks from the protected, monumental forest of the Red Zone (Zone Rouge) near Verdun, France. The installation traces the entangled legacies of the First World War and the current climate crisis in a landscape scarred on a monumental scale. The film unfolds in short chapters, weaving together contemporary drone footage, aerial LiDAR imaging of craters and trenches, and historical photographs of the devastated post-WWI landscape, interspersed with slow panoramic close-ups of fallen bark bearing beetle traces.

Still from ‘Between the Lines,’ Marjolijn Dijkman, 2024 -2025

The sound composition part of the installation draws inspiration from military marching bands, Morse code communication from the First World War, and the sounds bark beetles use to navigate beneath the bark. Electrotechnician Lukas Pol developed and built the robotic installation; composer Henry Vega wrote the composition for the sixteen robotic drummers in dialogue with the film.

The installation can be activated with an additional live performance, ‘Natura Rebellis,’ written for three vocalists by Henry Vega.

Still from ‘Between the Lines,’ Marjolijn Dijkman, 2024 -2025

Context
The 120,000-hectare Red Zone was defined by the French government after the war as “Completely devastated. Damage to properties: 100%. Damage to Agriculture: 100%. Impossible to clean. Human life impossible”.

Nine villages and surroundings in the Red Zone near Verdun were sealed off completely, rendered death traps by unexploded ordnance, and contaminated beyond habitation by the arsenic, chlorine, and phosgene that the opposing armies aimed at each other. There are still over 80.000 lost soldiers buried in the forest of Verdun who were never recovered.

As a post-war restitution, Germany donated spruces to reforest the thousands of hectares of polluted landscape. They planted many mono-cropped Norway spruces in straight rows, following the scientific production forest management invented in Germany in the 18th century. These dense forests aimed to protect people from entering, creating a ‘Living Sarcophagus.’

  Still from ‘Between the Lines,’ Marjolijn Dijkman, 2024 – 2025

In the scorching summers of 2018 and 2019, a hundred years after WWI ended, the bark beetle Ips Typographus invaded these monoculture forests around Verdun. The National Forestry Agency (ONF) has cleared the infected areas in the last few years. This is important to avoid forest fires, but it is a dangerous and slow process because of the estimated 12 – 15 million pieces of unexploded ordnance that are still present in the soil.

In ‘Between the Lines,’ the sanitized, barren, and reopened landscape symbolizes the consequences of the war, the industrialization of forest management, and the impact of the current climate crisis.

  Still from ‘Between the Lines,’ Marjolijn Dijkman, 2024 – 2025

Documentation of Between the Lines at Out of Sight, Antwerp, BE (2025)