Simone Hooymans presentation of The Perpetual Tapestry on Culture Night 11 September
Good evening, and thank you all for coming.
I’m very happy to be here at Kunsthall 3,14 and to share The Perpetual Tapestry with you. I am showing it here for the first time in it’s full glory.
In the middle of the installation you see the total film. The side wings are showing the details of the film, revealing the deeper layers of the tapestry.
This work grew out of my fascination with how people throughout history have imagined the end of the world.
I’m particularly interested in how these visions of apocalypse reflect the fears of their own time. In the Middle Ages, people were confronted with plague, war, famine and religious fear. Today, we have climate change, ecological collapse, pandemics and war.
The images change, but the feeling is strangely familiar.
One of the main sources of inspiration for this work is The Apocalypse Tapestry in Angers.
For those who don’t know it, it is an enormous medieval tapestry, more than 100 metres long, made in the late 14th century for Louis I, Duke of Anjou. It tells the story of the Apocalypse from the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, based on the visions of Saint John.
It is filled with dramatic images of angels, beasts, battles, destruction and the Four Horsemen. But it also mixes the biblical story with the reality of the 14th century. You can see medieval soldiers, knights, cities and political references from the time.
So although it tells a very old story, it was also very much a story about the world in which the people who made it were living. It was created during the Hundred Years’ War, a time of war, famine and disease.
I became so fascinated by this that I travelled to France to see the tapestry for myself. This was only a few weeks before the pandemic broke out.
Standing in front of this Hugh tapestry was quite overwhelming. It is not just a historical object. It feels like entering somebody else’s vision of the world from hundreds of years ago.
When I began working on this film, I was thinking a lot about the world we live in. About climate change, war, viruses, ecological collapse, and the constant stream of disturbing news that we are all exposed to. Nowadays it can feel as if the world is falling apart faster than I can understand it.
By the time I travelled back home from visiting this historical tapestry I already saw a lot of people going around with face masks and fear in their eyes for this invisible virus spreading around.
Back in my studio I found myself looking backwards, towards history and art history, searching for ways of making sense of these worldwide happenings.
We are also surrounded by images of crisis and destruction. We have climate change, ecological collapse, war and a growing feeling of uncertainty about the future.
So I began to wonder: what would an apocalypse tapestry look like today? I started to develop my idea for this animation with the perspective of the world we are living in now.
5 years went by while developing this film in divided working periods. I this 5 years a lot has happened in the world.
We only just came out of a terrible pandemic, but the daily headlines gives us new disruptions every day, war, fires, floods, big political leaders shouting, shooting, telling us it is all a lie and fake and in the middle a little girl in a yellow raincoat striking from school to give attention to climate change giving voice to a young generations with uncertain future.
I worked with many elements from the tapestry in Angers, including the Four Horsemen, representing conquest, war, famine and death, and the Angels with their seven trumpets announcing catastrophe.
But I wanted to take these medieval symbols into a new and constantly changing world.
And in the centre of this all are the BEES. They came out of my personal story.
My father was a beekeeper, he kept his beehives on the flat roof of our garage. During summer they swarm around in our garden. I grew up surrounded by bees and with the knowledge that the bees are an essential part of the circle of life. They connect flowers, plants, food and the wider ecosystem.
But today, bees and other pollinators are under increasing pressure. Monoculture, the loss of wildflowers and habitats, pesticides and climate change are all making their lives more difficult.
So for me, the bees are not only a memory from my childhood. They have become a symbol of how connected everything is, and of how fragile that connection can be.
They can represent nature, time, history, humanity — or maybe my own attempt to understand the world and our place within it.
In my work, the bees are guiding the viewer on the journey through the collapsing world.
While the tapestry is in decay, the bees keep building. They keep weaving and repairing.
Everything in the film is changing. Landscapes grow, collapse and transform, but the bees continue.
All the images in the animation started as pencil and watercolour drawings. The drawings moved, transformed and escaped the limitations of paper. They became a world that you can enter.
And then while preparing the installation for this exhibition for at 3,14, something happened in the other direction: The digital tapestry moved back into the physical world and became material. The film became part of a loom, and I started making small woven banners that exist alongside the moving images and with a direct connection to the animation. They are hanging opposite of the installation. I call them:
Kissing Horses and Whistle-blowers.
The digital tapestry meets the physical one.
The work has travelled from drawing, to animation, and back into material again.
I find this connection between weaving and animation very interesting. In weaving, an image is built
thread by thread. In animation, movement is built image by image.
So in a way, animation is like weaving through time.
The tapestry is never fixed. It is constantly changing, unravelling and being woven again.
We are always adding something to the story, while at the same time destroying parts of what came before.
But there is also something hopeful in this.
Because if the tapestry can be unravelled, it can also be woven differently.
The possibility of change is always there.
The bees keep working
They keep building.
Might this be our possibility too?