It Must Have Been the Devil (2018)

The millions of years old sandstone area of ‘Petit Suisse’ in Luxembourg once offered shelter and protection to hunter-gatherers. Nowadays, you are overwhelmed by the many walkers who come to enjoy its nature. Early man was still unacquainted with this experience of admiring, to them nature was a place packed with natural violence, a source of danger with a possibility of spirits and ghosts but the certainty of robbers and wild animals. Gielen decided to walk through the area and to portray it as it could have been experienced in the past: as a dark and threatening forest, rocks with holes that look upon you with the eyes of an evil spirit, inexplicable crevices and cairns that must have been the work of the devil. In the exhibition she combines original, historical postcards with images of rock formations.