Berte & Harmey

Berte & Harmey

Nul Punt Wolk is a project and collaboration between Irish artist Cliona Harmey and Belgian artist Filip Berte (berte & harmey). Working from a place of friendship and shared interests they have developed a remote collaborative practice.

Belgian architect and visual artist Filip Berte (Ghent, 1976) explores space from multiple perspectives looking at issues such as migration, visibility, liminality, and the concept of borders. A critical engagement is integral to his interdisciplinary and process-oriented art practice. Filip Berte takes a position in the background of this increasingly polarised landscape, trying to offer a poetic form of resistance, creating a momentum from an in-between position. He considers his role as an artist as the one of a mediator, tackling questions of hospitality, polarisation, (dis-)integration, observation, surveillance, control, distance, (human) proximity, (in-)visibility, physical exposure and the passage of time.

Cliona Harmey (1970) works primarily with technology subtly exploring the politics inherent in both contemporary and historical socio-technical systems using material exploration and hands-on artistic practice to try to understand /reveal their materiality and logic. She is interested in different ways of making immaterial and mutable data tangible and the processes of its capture and production. Further areas of interest include : communication technologies, infrastructure, public art /audience engagement. Cliona works at a variety of scales from large-scale public art (Dublin Ships 2015) to systems based works for gallery and off-site exhibition.

Nul Punt Wolk: Points of Departure, Attempts at Orientation
Points of Departure, Attempts at Orientation brings together a series of fragments with a connection to aerial imaging, aviation, mapping and landscape demarcation. The installation includes two large sculptural Bare Maps, which show bare earth visualisations of the surrounding  environments of two 1917 airfields: Baldonnel (IE) and Oostakker (BE). Created using aerial LiDAR point cloud data, these maps show the earth stripped bare of its buildings and vegetation yet retaining the trace details such as tracks, ‘desire lines’, patterns of use and areas of enclosure. 

Appearing semi-photographic, this type of aerial view has been enabled by the changing technologies of communication, mapping, optics, capture and transit which have ushered in our contemporary globalised world. Viewing the maps, we can’t help but think of earlier post war images and the all too real spectres of conflict today. The Bare Maps were created as a space to gather and look at the earth together and reflect on how things might be different. It is hoped that the Bare Maps and their clouds (‘wolk’ in Dutch) could act as a space of departure, with the potential to prompt reflection around alternate futures and histories. 

Accompanying the maps are a generated glossary (‘Glossa’) gleaned both from on the ground experience and official reports of the mapped spaces as well as archival imagery which includes the former Aerodrome at Oranmore and one of the last images from a roll of film taken on an aerial survey return flight to Baldonnel (Dublin). 

Credits: Nul Punt Wolk’s Dublin Bare Maps were made possible by an Arts Council Project Award. The LiDAR data used was supplied courtesy of Ordnance Survey Ireland and Eodas Flanders. The Archival images presented here are provided courtesy of the Irish Military Archive. The maps are presented on support structures designed in collaboration with OS_Studio Brussels. The riso prints were created at Topo Copy, Ghent, Belgium. Nul Punt Wolk’s project development started after a Prototyping Residency at Timelab Ghent which explored commoning and artistic practice. The artists would like to thank all the people who supported and advised on the production and development of the project since its inception.

Image: Filip Berte & Cliona Harmey (berte & harmey). Overview of Bare Map ‘BMg’ as shown at BLANCO Ghent. Medium: mounted riso prints, custom 3D printed parts, dowels. The presentation was supported by Culture Ireland and NCAD Gallery.