Exhibition Impulse: Internal Landscapes by Laura Riggi

Friday 29 May – Friday 28 August

Visit the exhibition in Impulse during weekdays between 8.30 and 18.00 hrs (opening times may change during summer period, keep an eye on www.wur.eu/impulse for the newest details)

Address: Stippeneng 2, Wageningen Campus

Inspired by My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola, the works move through a landscape where spirits, nature, and memory converge. Part of the works draw on Tutuola’s dreamlike and unsettling vision of the bush as a realm inhabited by ghosts and shifting identities. Figures and landscapes emerge, shaped by lived experience, and inspired by traditional and contemporary artists from across the world. This work is a personal  meditation on spirituality and the limits of rationality, challenging my own scientific mind and its desire to classify, explain, and contain.

The other works emerge from years of research on insects in the food culture in Benin, focusing particularly on termites. Beyond their remarkable ecological functions, termite mounds exist at the intersection of the social, cultural, and spiritual worlds. They are sources of food, indicators of soil fertility, and they are also sacred sites associated with ancestral spirits and deities. In many communities, ceremonies were performed at these mounds, and disturbing them was forbidden.

Scientific knowledge now confirms observations long embedded within these traditional beliefs: termite mound soils are often more fertile, better aerated, and more resistant to erosion. These pieces explores how spiritual understandings, grounded in observation, memory, and symbolic meaning, cultivate another form of knowledge, one that encourages humility before what cannot be fully comprehended, measured or seen. Together, the two parts of the exhibition create a dialogue between empirical research and the unseen worlds that continue to shape human relationships with nature and the landscapes we live in.

More information: BushOfGhosts