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Tom Bogaert

Tom Bogaert, Ant Farm Lagos, installation view with guests, Lagos Biennial 2019

Tom Bogaert, Ant Farm Lagos, installation view with guests, Lagos Biennial 2019.

Born Bruges, Belgium (1966), lives and works in New-York City, USA

Ant Farm Lagos 2019
Ants, plastic chairs, wooden map, various foodstuff
Courtesy of the artist

The production of this installation was made possible by generous support of the Art House Foundation residency programme.

This site-specific installation consists of a multi-colored map of Lagos Island made of translucent “agar-agar” – a vegetarian gelatin substitute combined with white wine. The map functions as an ant farm; the gel serves as both habitat and nutrition for the ants. This allows the viewer to watch the ants turn the gel map into a colony of tunnels. Ant Farm Lagos at this stage symbolises what it means to be able to bend space, to live with the agility to move between particular social, religious, political and economic registers.

Artist statement

Ant Farm Lagos is inspired by an ArtSchool Palestine residency in Nablus in 2011, where I mapped remnants of ‘inverse geometry’, a so-called ‘high concept spatial technique’ used by the Israeli Defense Forces in their 2002 offensive against the Palestinian resistance, and described by Eyal Weizman in his ‘Walking Through Walls’:

‘…soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of metres of ‘overground tunnels’ […] the military borrowed metaphors from the world of aggregate animal formation as ‘swarming’ and ‘infestation’…’

I’m convinced that a benign interpretation of the military concept of the city as not just the site, but the very medium of warfare, a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux can be implemented in Lagos as a provocative base for reflection and concrete action.