Dries Segers: Hotel Bellevue

Belgian artist Dries Segers' exhibition and book project 'Hotel Bellevue' presents a vocabulary centered around border trees, Celtic historical facts and visual speculation.

Mark trees are trees that are planted at strategic locations in the landscape. They make visible certain transitions of national, community and property borders. Multiple administrations monitor the conservation of these trees. Governments are obliged by law to maintain, replant and protect them. In a changing geopolitical landscape, however, these trees often lose their function as cultural-historical bearers and merge into their environment as non-information.

Trees have been present on this planet for 370,000,000 years. They have fallen into invisibility because they are losing their function in the landscape to a new, fuller panorama of symbols and signs. Road-building, agriculture and urbanisation have a lot to do with this, but so do technological and industrial progress. Centuries ago, some trees functioned as visual elements in a landscape in order to orient ourselves.

With 'Hotel Bellevue’, Dries Segers takes a first step in designing alternative cartographies. He merges symbols, signs and words, and has them engraved with a laser-cut technique in the frames of his artworks. Since their development, humans have expressed themselves in simplified drawings and symbols. It is from the same need that Segers incorporates this graphic language into his work.