Flown (Vervlogen)

Flown (Vervlogen)

Flown is an installation about death. The Rhijnhof Cemetery, a green oasis of the dead, is located on the outskirts of Leiden. People have been buried at Rhijnhof since 1910, and after ten or twenty years their graves are cleared. How many people have been buried here in the history of the cemetery? Where are their souls? Are they still remembered, or have their memories faded with time?

The Flown installation is about the circle of life and death, the concrete and metaphorical role played by nature in this process. It is inspired by the Cabbage White Butterfly (Pieris rapae), another passer by at Rhijnhof. This tiny butterfly breeds rapidly, passing through between two and four generations in a single year. A glass display case tells the story of the Cabbage White, presenting the statistics of the wandering souls, the grave records and the prepared butterflies. The glass display case has a green background, on which the poem ‘The unsculpted image’ by Michael Zeeman can be read. In the large hall, the butterflies appear as intangible points of light with trembling wings on the 9-metre long wall. View the film on YouTube