The Nature Within

Where the most intimate encounter between He and She becomes universal as a cosmic orgasmic explosion of desire, Lars von Trier shows us the nature within, by wo/man becoming tree, and many becoming one.

A gathering of voices in a network of roots, hands and reproduction. “The tree has a strange personality”, She says, and so in this image we see how the tree is no longer a tree, but a rhizomatic network of multiple entryways.

A network without a centre

In botany, a rhizome is characterized by its ability to shoot new roots from its nodes, even after being separated, like ginger or turmeric.

In A Thousand Plateaus from 1980, written by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, the rhizome is explained as an image of thought, a concept describing an open and organic understanding of knowledge that can be used as a model of society, in which culture spreads, agglomerates and aggregates in an endless number of directions, rather than growing from A to B.

GILLES DELEUZE & FÉLIX GUATTARI  /  A THOUSAND PLATEAUS  /  1980

Becoming, rather than being

In The Nature Within we sense a becoming, rather than a static being. It is not only the two of them, but the many of them, dissolving into each other, forming a choir of endless voices.

Their bodies intermingle with the spirits of the tree, evoking the ancestors of the forest in a mythical dance creating a sacred and liminal space of transgressing the distinction between man and nature, making it obsolete, as if we are witnessing a ritual of hybridization between every living being that ever were and is ever to become.