Natura Rebellis

Natura Rebellis is a live performance written by composer Henry Vega for three vocalists, accompanied by an orchestra of robotic drummers, playing trunks from the protected forest on former WWI battlefields near Verdun, France. The singers evoke memories of poets celebrating nature and reveling in the forest, but the forest prevails; it always overcomes.

This performance builds on the installation ‘Between the Lines’ and highlights our conflicting nature while revealing our capabilities to live in harmony. The sound composition part of the installation draws on military marching bands, Morse code, and the sounds bark beetles use to navigate beneath bark.

The sound and film installation focuses on the effects of drought and climate change in this forest located in the Red Zone (Zone Rouge) in the northeast of France. It relates to the ongoing struggle to address the aftermath and remnants of the First World War amid the global climate crisis, which affected this particular landscape on a monumental scale. 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.

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 part of post-war restitution, Germany donated spruces to reforest 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 were intended to prevent people from entering, creating a ‘Living Sarcophagus.’

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 was a dangerous and slow process because of the estimated 12 – 15 million pieces of unexploded ordnance that are still present in the soil.