Yerra Chandanam, 2022

Yerra Chandanam is a video Installation made for the Laboratory of Dutch Customs Office (Douane Laboratorium). Inside the laboratory, the workers analyse artefacts and products which have been illegally imported, incorrectly taxed or don’t adhere to Dutch product standards. These films were made as an installation to be viewed by the laboratory workers of the customs office, shown on loop for a period of 4 months.

The Red Sandalwood tree grows endemically in the Eastern Ghats mountain range in South East India. “Yerra Chandanam” is the name of the Red Sandalwood tree in the language Telugu, spoken in this region of India. At the Douane Laboratorium, there is a confiscated sample of Red Sandalwood which has been illegally felled and imported to the Netherlands. Red Sandalwood is rare and valued greatly around the world for its medicinal, acoustic and aesthetic properties, due to this, the trade of the wood is illegal. Shown above, part one of the film Yerra Chandanam depicts the hills of the Eastern Ghats mountain range where this tree grows, along with other viewpoints in the same region on 16 mm analog film. The physical film itself travelled with me from Europe to South East India and back. It travelled through the Eastern Ghats by train and rickshaw, and travelled too, through the camera, which exposed the forests onto the film frame by frame. Finally the film was delivered to a film lab in Amsterdam to be developed and scanned into digital video, in order to produce the images seen. While the sample of wood cannot travel, this film was made as a gesture, bringing the context of the Red Sandalwood tree from South East India into the Douane Laboratory, aiming to reunite the sample with its environment.

Part Two of the film shows a 3D animated landscape made up of various natural artefacts, consisting of trees, rocks and a termite’s nest, all of which I collected during my trip in India. Rather than taking the physical objects with me, I made 3D scans of them whilst trekking through the nature. The only exception in the film is the Red Sandalwood sample, which I scanned in the Douane Laboratorium before leaving to India. The artefacts are displayed in the second part of this film, which shows the wood sample growing layer by layer within the 3D landscape. In the state of a digital 3D object, the wood is 3D printable, and the layers shown in the video are those which a 3D printer would create if it were 3D printing the wood object. The 3D printing of the wood sample is visualised here as an animation instead, showing its ‘growth’ layer by layer. In the temporal state of growth, the inside of the 3D model reveals itself to us, represented as a red helix structure. Literally placing the 3D version of the wood amongst other 3D models from the Indian landscapes where it originally grew, is another gesture towards returning the Red Sandalwood sample from the Douanelab back to its South Indian origins, within a fictional landscape. The extent to which the film manages to reunite the wood sample with its environment depends on the viewer’s ideas of ‘environment,’ as a real, physical place, or a more fluid, flexible notion. But arguably the film and the Red Sandalwood sample share a place of origin.

Shown here are excerpts of part 1 and 2. To view the full versions, please get in touch: ignasvanrijckevorsel(at)gmail.com

Credits:
Camera, Editing, 3D scanning, Directed by: Ignas van Rijckevorsel
Production, Location & Transport assistance: Sebastian Wieczorek
Sound (Part 2): Andres Garcia Vidal
16mm Film Developing: Andec Berlin
16mm Film Scanning: Onno Petersen
Made for Douane Laboratium Nederland
Made possible by the Rietwood Stichting & VAV Gerrit Rietveld Academie

Thanks to:
Ben Geraerts
Agnies Calkoen
Carlijn Fransen
Margriet Kruijver
Martin Grootenboer
Marieken Overdijk
Goedele Cheroute
Yana Khazanovich
Shakeel Rizvi (Bastar Tribal Homestay)
Bastar Tribal Community
Friends Bike Rental Jagdalpur
Dipti Ogre
Jimmy Uikey