'OFF ROAD/VILDVEJE' BY JEANETTE LAND SCHOU 
Courtesy Birthe Laursen Art Agency

Human interactions with wild, primordial nature have become so rare, that any such encounter now seems estranged and abject. Our understanding of nature in the global North has turned into bizarre conventions, now ingrained in the cultural reproduction of national history. Our dominant understanding of nature has been established and cultivated by man and is strongly influenced by our geographical context. The great Danish beech forests, serving as an emblem of Danish nature, is a deep-seated illusion.

With the series Off Road/Vildveje Jeanette Land Schou offers us insight into the vegetation that inhabits Amager Fælled. The area is not categorized as wild nature, and yet the nature here exists without any particular intention in the fringe areas between the city and the countryside. The inquiring premise of the photographs demonstrate a harmony of composition in the untamed flora. Amidst entangled leaves and crooked trunks chaos reigns in a nonhierarchical system of profound balance. The images gently frame the nature as a living system with its own terms and inform us of a biodiversity and nature almost free from human interests.

The series attributes value to all entities and systems by decomposing conventional ideas about significance and beauty. The works become an invitation to let the gaze wander in pursuit of the mediating perspective of the photographs. Jeanette Land Schou's focus on that which is rarely assigned significance, generates a democratization of the photographic motif - in this case the purposeless wild nature.

Text by Anne Thomasen - translate by Nanna Gro Henningsen