“Many contemporary anxieties live inside us. Body and mind are thrown off balance by news, illness, and politics—shapeless threats that are hard to grasp. The urge to go outside feels logical: to feel the body again, and because the balance between rest and fight/flight is off. We swing to extremes: numbing through scrolling and easy series, or overcompensating with marathons and strength records. Those pulls toward both poles fascinate me.

I look at how we curate and appropriate nature within a managed landscape like Belgium, where trees are often planted, numbered, and pruned. Is nature truly serving our rhythm, or do we project that rhythm onto it? My work pursues that question through images.

This dynamic is also visible in media culture: the popularity of YouTube channels such as Outdoor Boys, Cyprien Outdoor Adventure, where comfort is deliberately exchanged for campfire, bivouac, and self-build—a ritual of ‘de-comforting’ to get closer to a so-called original self. At the same time, that ruggedness is both real and curated; this precise tension resonates with my work, alongside the opposite pole: pushing the body to its limits in (ultra)marathons or hikes in extreme conditions.”