Hotel Bellevue

Hotel Bellevue by Dries Segers is a beautiful, small photo book and a vocabulary centered around border trees, Celtic historical facts and visual speculation. This book is a manifesto for love, anger, the non-human, a wish to connect, to suggest, and to study. Only things from the heart deliver.
Mark trees are trees that are planted at strategic locations in the landscape. They make visible certain transitions of national, community and property borders. Multiple administrations monitor the conservation of these trees. Governments are obliged by law to maintain, replant and protect them. In a changing geopolitical landscape, however, these trees often lose their function as cultural-historical bearers and merge into their environment as non-information.
Trees have been present on this planet for 370,000,000 years. They have fallen into invisibility because they are losing their function in the landscape to a new, fuller panorama of symbols and signs. Road-building, agriculture and urbanisation have a lot to do with this, but so do technological and industrial progress. Centuries ago, some trees functioned as visual elements in a landscape in order to orient ourselves.