21-05-26
eddie d's Time-Based Garden
Interview by Eleni Maragkou
At LI-MA, each “Artist in Focus” opens up a space to look closely at how media art is made, and how it continues to shift over time. This season we turn to eddie d, a Dutch video artist whose practice has long been defined by rhythm, editing, and the transformation of everyday material into tightly woven audiovisual compositions.
Since his early work in the Dutch media art scene, eddie d has worked with found television fragments, spoken language, and ordinary gestures, cutting and reassembling them into pieces where timing becomes meaning. His videos operate like scores: repetition, pause, and interruption shape the viewer’s experience as much as image or narrative. The result is a body of work that is precise yet unstable, often shifting between humour, critique, and abstraction.
In the 1990s, eddie d began developing what he called video poems: short audiovisual works in which spoken language and sound are shaped into rhythmic compositions. Emotion is distilled into fragmentary, often abstract phrases, where meaning emerges as much through timing and tone as through words themselves. Through precise editing, gestures and facial expressions are arranged into a kind of visual choreography, marked by repetition and subtle variation.
In recent years, this attention to time, structure, and process has expanded beyond the screen into a very different medium: a large garden in rural Netherlands. There, growth, decay, and maintenance unfold at a slower register, but with a similar sensitivity to rhythm and composition. What emerges is not a contrast between art and life, but a continuation of the same logic across different scales of time.
What was it that first drew you to video art?
In art school I started out in graphic design but soon discovered the multimedia department, where they worked with super 8 film. Which I loved. At that time they just started the media art department, headed by Rene Coelho. When I first entered a video editing suite, with those u-matic players and large monitors, I was sold. Working with sound, rhythm (I was the drummer in a funky punk rock band) and moving images was what I wanted to do. So I soon tried to make music using video. I loved editing.
How did your relationship with LI-MA begin?
Via René Coelho, who also headed Montevideo.
Your work moves between video, installation, sound, and more recently gardening and landscape. How has your understanding of time-based art evolved over the years?
I guess my sense of time has changed. My most recent video works were based on the idea of still-live, but of course not too still. Those have a very different notion of time than my single channel videos. With gardening time has a very different meaning.
You describe the garden as a form of time-based art. What changes when we begin to think about living systems – with their rhythms of growth, decay, maintenance, and transformation – through the same lens as video or media art?
I started to do serious gardening, after I moved from Amsterdam to the countryside. Me and my co-head gardener (my wife) started with a blank canvas as they say, we had 5000 m2 meadow that we wanted to turn into a garden. When I gained enough confidence and experience in designing and making the garden to do it intuitively, I started to notice that I used the same basic ideas as in making video art: rhythm, repetition, colour, sound, time and touch. Even editing. As a bonus you can work with scent in the garden. The timescale is of course totally different; my videos were rarely longer than five minutes and here I had to think in seasons, years and even decades. I started thinking of the garden as a process, as the famous garden designer Mien Ruys used to say.
Both gardens and media artworks are inherently unstable: technologies become obsolete, plants die, environments shift. What, for you, is essential to preserve when change is inevitable?
In the garden I want to preserve and sustain live, below, in and above the soil, for which we try to provide the conditions. Our garden is constantly changing, it’s alive. I try to use the plants I love, but if it turns out the conditions or the soil are not what a specific one needs, I’ll try different ones. Fortunately nature, and plant growers, make sure there is enough to choose from. I like the garden to partly design itself by selfseeding and spreading.
If the technology I use becomes obsolete, I’ll try to use a different one to do what I want to do. Or I’ll do something else.
Your work often embraces process over permanence. How do you feel about institutions attempting to archive or stabilise works that are fundamentally alive or evolving?
I think it’s great LI-MA wants to preserve works, and I love a place like archive.org. But I never expected my work to outlive me. I can really enjoy most of my work, I always was firstly my own audience, but I love it when others can enjoy it too. I really like it when someone discovers an ancient, to them, video work that I made. It’s a shame when good things disappear, but sometimes you can’t do anything about it. With installation works, it can be difficult to preserve them.
Your practice often leaves room for chance, slowness, and unpredictability. In a cultural moment shaped by acceleration and constant stimulation, do these qualities feel more important to you now than before?
Maybe that’s why I started making those still-lives. But I also felt like I had nothing to add to the videos I already made, so I’m not sure about that. Making a garden is very therapeutic and relaxing but there is also a lot going on all the time, so plenty of stimulation. But of a healthier kind than with social media, et cetera.
What captures your attention or inspires you today?
When I look at satellite images of our area I notice this is sort of an oasis in the agriculture desert, and looking around the garden and seeing all this life, that is inspiring. Also when we have an open garden day and hearing from visitors what effect the garden had on them, that’s wonderful. These days I have quite a different audience than with art exhibitions and festivals.