In his installations, Aernout Mik, who was born in Groeningen, Netherlands, in 1962, gets viewers to move between a bewitching architecture and hypnotic, almost tactile images. His videos expand in space, dodging the fl at, two-dimensional character peculiar to the film image. Nearly all his works are presented in the form of an overhead projection which starts off on the floor and ends up, inside a wooden lintel, at human height. Screen after screen, and video after video, Mik's installations trace itineraries in which the spectator discovers characters who seem to merge, through repetitive and mimetic actions. These at times violent, at others indolent movements do not seem to have any specific aim, even if the onlooker may well suspect that they are not gratuitous. For Mik, our relationships to others are established at distinctly more complex levels than those having to do with psychology. The interdependence with space, time, the animate and the inanimate, lends group relations an almost organic and biological character. This is why the artist seeks to formulate scenes in which the characters' action withstands the laws of narrative logic. In Park (2002), 20 men and women meet in a wooded space. Some leap about and dance around a tree, without anything whatsoever apparently happening, while others frolic in the grass and others still are sitting down engrossed in mysterious tasks. While the group frenetically and absurdly carries on its activities, the camera's lens all of a sudden sweeps across the tree-tops, showing their verdant foliage, and even thereby suggests that their existence as plants is part and parcel of the whole performance. The trees, like the people, dogs and notices hanging on a wall or tree, actually appear to have no shared objective other than to merely exist, and be there. This same aim can be applied to other works by this artist, like Float, Territorium, 3 Laughing, 4 Crying and Organic Escalator, in which the environment, in its uncertainty, is attractive enough for the subjects to adapt to it and let themselves be borne along by it, but without shedding their independence. It could be said that most of the teeming figures in Aernout Mik's videos are devoid of any biography to catch hold of. It is hard, to say the least, to imagine them with a personal history to recount, or with characters likely to single them out in relation to the remainder of the group. In so much as Mik is more interested in the analysis of the biosocial space than of the psychological space, he elects to radically get rid of any sign indicating domestication and civilization, power and influence, personality and character. Thus stripped, the human being is akin to the animal or vegetal being, but also, in the final analysis, the inanimate object, in its essence. This forced brotherhood between the animate and the inanimate, as proposed by Mik in his works, takes cognizance of mechanisms of assimilation, adaptation and interaction with the surroundings, which usually go unnoticed, or remain invisible to our eyes. In Park, the fate of each one of the protagonists seems to be unique. They do not look at each other any more because they have no emotional contact. From afar, we suspect a vague acknowledgement of the other's existence, even if this is simply to minimize it, or partially incorporate it. In a situation where two individuals – let's call them A and B – share the same space, anything can come to pass. As Jorge Wagensberg notes in an essay devoted to Mik's work, ”Interaction can be such that the two patterns of behaviour cancel each other out and silence reigns. Interaction can be such that laughter holds sway. Interaction can be such that, conversely, sadness predominates. Interaction can be such that, in an infinite number of possibilities, any one of them may come to the fore. But there is only one case where everything remains as it was before, and this is when AB is the simple sum of A plus B, when A fails to communicate with B, that's when the interaction equals zero.” The viewer's effort to try and get beyond the extravagance of the scenes painstakingly constructed by Mik is rewarded when he gives up looking for any conventional narrative thread, when he lets himself be swept along by the fluctuations of the unforeseeable, of uncertainty and of chaos. The balance between external forces and our own experience, between the uncontrollable and the cultural, between the possible and the desirable, draws the map of human existence and once more corroborates the fragility of its condition. Once and for all, in an oblique and suggestive way, Aernout Mik's work makes reference to what configures and defines our social and political environment.

Marta Gili

Translated by Simon Pleasance