The bioart of Dorita Savert or: the process as a product (by Aja Waalwijk)

From 3 March to 10 April, nomadic artist Dorita Savert exhibits photographs, paintings, water-colours and installations in Zaal 100 (De Wittenstraat 100, Amsterdam). These are serial productions in which natural processes are central and which also result in a form-technical dissolution. What started with viewing boxes to bring intimacy, led to water-colours and drawings of flowers literally floating above their passe-partouts. According to Dorita, they give the paper the tar that also characterizes dry flowers. Its recent small-format installations, made between 2022 and 2026, continue to do so. They consist of flat-printed plants that are pressed with shiny bolts and nuts between thick transparent plates of perspex. Something that gives the organisms, just like in a viewing box, a spatial character. But unlike a herbarium, in which plants are dried to prevent rotting, the process of rotting at Dorita is starting point.

Dorita: ‘Things don’t stand still. There is not only bloom to capture, but also transience, and that is what these artworks carry in them. I see them partly as time capsules. Some have mold stains or they pulverize into dust, because what they have in common is that time and time again they not only shift in colour, but completely change, blend into something else. With a collection of mushrooms, white worms appeared between the plates and even flies that realized that they could escape through the side. They’re metamorphoses. But it is also a game with meanings and they also change because of the shape in which I cast images. I therefore combine the plants from this series with photos of industrial heritage to blend into each other by a mixture of techniques inside and outside.’

Dorita visualizes multiple layers by combining different forms of depth. Because of the thick presspex plates, the plants between them obtain spaciousness and by placing photos behind them, a dimension is added. The background photos show disused industrial complexes, such as affected and overgrown halls or machines. They suggest, because of, among other things, a perspective course, a different form of space experience than that of the perspex plates. But it doesn’t stop there. By printing the photos on transparent paper, the environment, or the colour or structure of the place where the work hangs, also becomes an integral part. The artwork is a symbiosis. You can also say that the artwork extends spatially beyond its boundary.

Part of the exhibition also consists of a series of landscape photographs on aluminium. By merging two more or less equal photos vertically and hanging the lowest upside down, apparent water levels arise. Even an inverted blue sky seems like a reflection, but appearances cheat; the landscape underneath is not just a reversal. And in addition to a number of paintings of flowers, velvety set up for partly blurry backgrounds, there are also painted landscapes, supplemented by calligraphic elements set up in red paint.

Dorita: ‘After a brain haemorrhage from my father, I made a number of painted landscapes with symbols derived from programming language from the computer world.’

The figures are from flowcharts (flow charts). These are schematic representations to visualize processes or to be able to find errors and bottlenecks in them. I saw them as symbolic of holes in memory. I wondered, “What are we looking at?” What do we think we see?’ I now also make drawings on the basis of a microscope. I also portray a process with this. I now see plants in which, on the micro level, torrets appear to be alive again and I draw them, but abstractly, in the sense of fragmentation: shields, wings, loose flakes. For me, inclusiveness means visualizing interactive spaces. Environments are important, consist of spheres that complement each other. In a new series of short films, photos and drawings, I use geo-coordinates as titles. They indicate the place where the work originated, are a form of location art, so as a cartographer I now shape ways to connect locations. Landscapes are pieces of nature. But where are you? Where do you feel at home? Here and there I still find places that I think: that is a location to be, such a place that gives the feeling that you are; part of the weather, the stars, the sky, the spring, the autumn. Being outside is then being part of being outside; an absorbed in something like a fish in the water.’ On Sunday 15 March there will be the opportunity to meet the artist from 15:00.