Lignum-Motricium (Hout als beweger)

Beyond your perception

Lignum-Motricium is a little steel cart. On the front of the cart is a little wooden slab, and on the back is a gearbox with steel wheels. The heart of this cart is a fresh wooden log that serves as its motor. As this fresh wood slowly dries, it begins to crack and the crack begins slowly to expand. This minimal expansion is translated through a system of gear ratios, moving the cart forward. One millimetres of expansion in the slab of wood results in one-hundred millimetres of forward motion.

Agency

In a world where everything appears to accelerate: technology, communication and the rhythm of daily life, Lignum-Motricium acts as a counterweight. This machine is so slow it escapes our momentarily perception. It invites contemplation on the pace of nature, the human experience, and the transience of both technology and life itself. Wood, an ever-changing material, becomes not only a mechanism for motion but also a metaphor for patience and impermanence.

This kinetic movement suggests that nature has long since devised its own hidden forces and mechanisms. Nature is a quiet, patient inventor, offering systems that may guide us in solving our own dilemmas, even if these methods are not immediately applicable or fast-acting. The cart’s slow movement calls for a re-evaluation of time itself, prompting us to reflect on the speed with which we embrace modern technologies, and how easily we overlook the steady, enduring rhythms of the natural world.

Breaking time

This piece invites reflection on our relationship with nature, on how we often seek to control it. While nature has, for millennia, embodied the principles of patience, transformation, and strength. A call to embrace the silence of slowness in a time that grows ever louder and faster.
It is a meditation on our place in the world, the value of patience, the power of nature, and the ongoing search for balance between progress and the time, and what it truly takes to understand what it means to move forward.