Lila Veloo (2000, Groningen) is an artist and writer based in Groningen. Working across installation, publishing and text, her practice explores the tension between longing and the unreachable. Through language and its materiality, her work investigates the possibilities of using fiction as a method of research – where narratives blur fact, fragment and fabulation. Her practice explores a space where materiality touches mysticality; shaped by tangible encounters in landscapes, it unfolds through found objects and fragmented narratives: a prehistoric horse bone found on the shoreline, for example, or a water-eroded oyster shell. Such objects, carrying traces of deep time, become narrative tools, guiding a research process that is as intuitive as it is investigative – through which she explores ecological entanglements and the relationship between human and non-human life.
Lila about her residency:
”During my residency at VHDG, I’ve been deepening my artistic research into fiction-writing and storytelling – specifically exploring how fiction itself can be used as a method of investigation. Through this approach, I’ve explored the geological history of the landscapes surrounding Leeuwarden, shaped largely by glacial processes and rich with marine traces.
One particular fascination of mine has been the zwerfkeien (erratic boulders, direct Dutch translation: wandering stones) scattered across the Northern Dutch landscape – these (sometimes immensely big) stones have arrived here during the Ice Age, around 200,000 years ago, carried here by glaciers from Scandinavia. As I study their physical traces, I imagine a translucent glacier stretched across the land, as the water that was once part of this massive ice sheet is now flowing through my own body.
Do stones have memory? Does water hold time? Could an invisible imprint of a stone exist within me? How do we, as human beings, relate to these once-mysterious boulders embedded in the landscape?
I’m currently working on a publication in which I’ll share both textual and material findings from my time here in Leeuwarden.”
