Regrowth

The resilience of nature is astonishing. Destroy a piece of land, dump rubble and toxins, and let it clog up with everything that blows in. Don't look back, and it becomes beautiful all on its own.

I became fascinated with this kind of landscape where different perspectives come together in a multitude of textures without fixed form, plan or design. These are wild places.

For instance, adjacent to a friend's farm lies a neglected piece of land with remnants of an old greenhouse. Everything is now overgrown with hornbeam and thorny bushes. In Lithuania stands one of Europe's largest nuclear power plants. Closed now for years, and the city built next to it, always already half-hidden in the forest, now partially abandoned and overrun with dense vegetation. In Estonia, on the coast, lies an old seaside resort from the time of the Soviet Union, with villas with swimming pools, but also a large apartment building and a landfill, transformed after thirty years into a wild fairy tale forest.

After years of use or abuse, neglected land almost always regenerates into a new landscape. Unpredictable, alive, and perhaps also offering at least a glimpse of hope in this bleak age of ecological destruction.