STEFANIE ZOCHE

BACKGROUND

In my artistic work, I have been dealing with ecological issues for around 20 years, in particular the climate crisis, dwindling resources and the relationship between humans and nature. The media I use range from spatial installations and sculptures to video installations and photography.

In 2021 I realized the work “The author of the spruce bark”: The hot summers of recent years have weakened huge areas of forests in Germany to such an extent that they have been infested by bark beetles. I have piled up delicate plaster casts of these trunks and bark into a sculptural arrangement on a reflective black pool, reminiscent of the ice floes in Caspar David Friedrich’s “Sea of Ice”.

The installation was complemented by the “Journal of the Society for Therolinguistics”, which examines the language of animals and plants from a future perspective, based on the essay “The Author of Acacia Seeds” by the American author Ursula K. le Guin.

STEFANIE’S DO PICHO PROJECT

During my artist residency in Palas del Rei, I would like to deepen my engagement with the forest ecosystem:
I learned that a large paper mill is to be built in this area of Galicia, which would have a devastating impact on the environment: It would cover an area of 366 hectares, consume as much water as the entire province of Lugo and threaten the biodiversity of the entire region.

I lived in Portugal for some time and saw the ecological destruction caused by paper mills: Intact forests are often cleared to make room for monocultures of eucalyptus plantations. This non-native tree species displaces almost all other plants due to its secretion of essential oils and usually leads to a lowering of the groundwater table as it has very deep roots. This has very serious consequences for the surrounding agricultural areas and can lead to the formation of deserts in the long term.

During my artist residency in Palas, I would like to artistically engage with the existing forests on site, document their rich biodiversity and develop installative works from my observations. I am interested in communicating w i t h the local activists and finding out more background information.

These thoughts form a framework within which I would like to engage with the greatest possible openness about what I find during my research on site.

There is a project to build a huge cellulose factory on 366 hectares of land in the centre of Galicia. The factory would quench its thirst for paper and textile fibres with water from the river Ulla: it would need as much water as the entire province of Lugo. Its hunger for raw materials would drive out the native chestnut and oak forests and replace them with eucalyptus monocultures. The deep roots of this invasive species lower the water table and its essential oils cause devastating forest fires – all in all, an ecological disaster for the region’s biodiversity and quality of life.

During my residency in Do Picho, I made video recordings of the river Ulla and other bodies of water, of intact forests and burned eucalyptus monocultures, and of existing small-scale factories. It was important to me to find an artistic language that is not limited to expressing only the situation in Galicia, but that illuminates the relationship between man and nature more generally.

I will use this material to develop a two-channel video work that will be presented in a walk-in sculptural installation in Munich at Haus der Kunst (where it has been accepted for exhibition in the summer of 2025), and that I plan to present also in Galicia and Spain more broadly.