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Niels Devisscher

@nielsdevisscher

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Exploring myth, mystery, and regeneration through collage, analog photography, and writing.
Worldbuilder, Ecological Surrealist, Visual Designer.

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I'm really thrilled to announce that I've been awarded bronze in the prestigious Prix de la Photographie Paris (PX3) with my series 'In solitude' (also the only contest I took part in over the last two years).
PX3 is a renowned international photography competition which takes place annually. Winners are selected by a jury consisting of Steve McCurry, Robert Berman, James Wellford (nat geo), and many more.
Congrats to all winners!
#px3 #prixdelaphotographieparis #minimalism #fineartlandscape #fineart #blackandwhite #bnw @px3 by @nielsdevisscher

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6 years ago

This weekend, someone asked me what I think of AI art. My best response would be to show them this handmade collage.

AI will never feel an image being born from a seed inside the soul
Held by your tender body that knows pain and joy.

AI will never think of the cloak of Death and imagine the symbols able to carry its meaning.

Prompting will never replace your browsing through a picture book of animals, pausing at some to recall the memories you’ve made with them, pausing at others to feel the anticipatory grief of losing them.

Prompting will never feel the same as burning palo santo to charcoal as you draw black the cloak of Death and truly hold the loss of life you love.

Art is always more than the outcome. More than the dopamine shot you get when the machine dumps out something you like.

The artistic process is a spiritual process.

When I created this collage, I went into the desert and bowed to Death.

I greeted the animals.

I gazed at the chapel my ancestors erected high up, as if the sky were the only haven where our loved ones are safe and above mortality.

Ask, always, who you are creating for; who do you invoke? What relationships are you feeding or sacrificing in the act?

If you’re not ready for the underworld, the hard work of living and creating, you’re not ready to meet the Sublime.

Devote yourself to the higher subject of your art. With the increase in AI slop, more people will appreciate your laborious craft and process. Start to love the imperfections and don't be afraid to show them.

SPECIES LONELINESS (2026) - Mixed-media, handmade collage - © Niels Devisscher

#handmadecrafts #handmadecollage #collageart #noai by @nielsdevisscher

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a month ago

There comes a time in your life when you have to make a choice. A choice of creating and supporting Earth’s aliveness or adding to its degradation.

Last autumn we made a decision to learn how to rewild land, and to learn it from no other but Alan Watson Featherstone, a man who pioneered rewilding of the ancient Caledonian Forest in the Scottish Highlands.

In all honesty, it was one of the best weeks of our lives. In complete seclusion from the modern world, we lived in Glen Affric for 7 days without any phone signal or running water.

Alan shared stories of these life-altering decision points. The commitment to rewilding the land led Alan to found Trees For Life and plant over 2 million trees with the volunteers and staff (and protected hundreds and thousands more self-seeding trees from overgrazing deer).

He also taught us his methods and approach that can be applied in any context of rewilding.

This journey with Alan and his partner Pupak (who taught us about inner rewilding) was truly altering.

🐺To be wild is to be self-willed.

You can read the whole story of our rewilding training in @meander_magazine.

If you are interested, you can still join Alan in the next rewilding training, “A Rewilding Journey: Rewilding the World and Ourselves,” coming this October in Glen Affric.

Follow the link in the last slide or comment WILD, and we will send you the details.

#scotland #rewilding #rewildingscotland #caledonianforest #highlands taken in Glen Affric National Nature Reserve by @nielsdevisscher

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a month ago

What would a shift to relational food systems look and feel like?

The cosmolocal learning community otherWise commissioned me to create a collage that visually represents the essence and 6 core units of their forthcoming course (SWIPE FOR BEHIND THE SCENES & DETAILS) .

Inspired by the musical Hadestown, the course takes participants on a cyclical train journey through collapse, into the underworld of industrial food systems, and towards vibrant, relational community food systems. I created a physical model of a train track using tongue depressors, skewers, and cardboard

What's truly innovative about this journey is that participants can hop on the train at any time and join the course at different stations throughout the year.

Hadestown is based on the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone. In this myth, Hades abducts Persephone, the goddess of Spring Growth and queen of the Underworld.

It is in the underworld that she eats the seed of a pomegranate, which binds her to the shadow realm. Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, grain, and the harvest, is heartbroken by the loss of her daughter and eventually makes a pact with Hades so that Persephone may return half of the year. And when she returns, spring arrives once again, and so does the abundance of life and sustenance.

I wanted to show the connection between Demeter, weeping among the ruins and dying fields of winter, and Persephone, condemned to the Underworld. Demeter's tears form a stream that nourishes the only tree, a pomegranate, in the Underworld, and creates an invisible yet sacred lifeline between mother and daughter.

The collage also features Austeja, the Lithuanian Goddess of bees, Eshu, the Yoruba trickster God, and Pachamama, the Andean mother Goddess. Stay tuned for a behind-the-scenes video that will reveal more about the process, ideas, and goal behind the collage and course.

If you are eager to usher in relational food systems and want to learn from two leading voices in the regenerative food systems field Kemi Mugo & Nicole Civita, find out more via @otherwise.one pinnee post or otherwise.one/feeding-complexity-2 and join the waitlist! by @nielsdevisscher

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2 months ago

Comment COMMONS to join both online events facilitated by collage artist and photographer @nielsdevisscher 🐦‍⬛

otherWise invites you to learn in process, imperfectly, out loud and in community (both online and where you are). To support this more fully, we are now welcoming you to co-shape the otherWise Learning Commons – a shared, shifting resource pool for people learning to tend life in a time between worlds. Hover over an immersive collage, pull up a gathering guide, engage with the material in solitude or with kindreds. Let each question call you where it may. Insights travel as spores, weightless enough to cross continents, yet dependent on the specific conditions of the substrate where they settle to germinate. We cannot yet tell you what the Learning Commons most wants to be – that’ll emerge through the shared tending. taken in Great Oak Sherwood Forest by @nielsdevisscher

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3 months ago

In her essay on Cultivating a Personal Idea Culture, @rowenwhite observes that "when we interweave one another's gathered knowledge strings into a mutually recognizable social pattern, we have culture."

Rowen and others inspired us to create a learning commons, which is a mythical worlds that contain dozens of gathering guides on diverse topics –such as metamorphosis, disintegration, and conquerors. It's also our humble attempt to regrow a living culture and reimagine how we access, exchange, and co-create knowledge together.

Visual artist @nielsdevisscher designed three collages inspired by otherWise's community conversations and courses. In this video, he talks about the Tree of Life, which incorporates the magnificent Major Oak in Sherwood Forest. It paints a vision of a world where humans incubate inside cocoons and live alongside more-than-human kin. Dualities are in ongoing, creative tension, at the threshold where day meets night.

If you'd like to explore these collages, and the themes and ideas embodied in them, join us on July 24 and 30. Niels Devisscher will tell stories, and you get the opportunity to share what comes up in response to them, while practicing transcontextual thinking with like-minded peers!

Registration is free, but active participation is required. Simply comment COMMONS and we'll DM you the signup link!

#collageart #majoroak #worldbuilding #sherwoodforest #communityconversation by @nielsdevisscher

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3 months ago

Our photo essay "Rewilding Scotland's Wet Desert" is out in @meander_magazine.

@r_u__ta and I spent a week in Glen Affric, fetching water, planting native saplings, and learning to read a recovering landscape.

The Wet Desert is the term naturalist Frank Fraser Darling coined to describe Scotland’s vast, treeless landscape. While both visitors and inhabitants alike often imagine the Scottish Highlands as wild and otherworldly, in truth, little wilderness remains.

Despite these conditions, a big rewilding movement is taking root. Among its pioneers is Alan Watson Featherstone, founder of the charity @treesforlifeuk.

Inspired by Alan’s long-term devotion, we decided to join him and his wife, Pupak Haghighi, for their annual rewilding course in Glen Affric, Scotland. For a week, we would learn about regenerating inner and outer landscapes, and the practical steps to set up our own successful rewilding project.

37 years since its founding, Trees for Life has facilitated the natural regeneration of hundreds of thousands of native trees, and has planted over two million trees.

The essay narrates our experience living for a week in a remote bothy without running water, electricity, or reception. "Together, we cooked, cleaned, and made fire. My heart was filled with these relationships and their immediacy." We explore deer fences as an emergency measure, not the end goal. "The greater opportunity”, said Alan, “is that we humans have to learn to share the world with our own fellow species again.”

But the true red thread is Alan's practical philosophy of the green heart. Alan showed us that our true power as human beings arises from the passion and love in our hearts – and from the way we bring that love into the world through our work.

You can read our full essay with analog photographs in the beautiful Meander magazine. Find the link in my bio.

I'll also be posting more photos that didn't make the cut here in the following weeks, so stay tuned!

#rewilding #landregeneration #glennaffric #scotland taken in Glen Affric - Scotland by @nielsdevisscher

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3 months ago

On May 29, I opened my exhibition Thrutopia, showcasing a curation of collage art collaborations with some of the leading organizations in the regenerative movement.

Coined by Rupert Reed, Thrutopias lay out a map and articulate the core ingredients of a world worth aspiring to. Rather than sidestepping complex challenges, a thrutopia works through them head-on. As Reed writes: “We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul. Visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.”

It was beautiful to witness people discover worlds within worlds as they immersed themselves in the collages, and share stories and longings with each other. While, ironically, regeneration is often presented in dry and lifeless ways, I noticed how the room quickly filled with a vitalizing energy and a sense of hope. I believe this is where the power of visual art lies, and how we enliven people's ability to imagine otherwise – beyond the traps of dystopias and without bypassing the deep, uncomfortable work a true utopia requires of us.

Thank you all for such a large turnout. The exhibition remains open until July 4, from 9-19h at @cspaceberlin. More info via the link in bio.

Thank you Katja, Jan, and my dearest @r_u__ta for making this happen! taken in C-Space Berlin by @nielsdevisscher

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3 months ago

I am so excited for my first Berlin exhibition, “Thrutopia” — showcasing some of my favorite collage art collaborations with regenerative practitioners! (Please RSVP via link in bio)

While dystopias tend to leave us powerless and paralyzed, utopias are often idealized and unattainable images of the future. What they both fail to do is help us imagine what Stuart Kauffman called the ‘adjacent possible’, or a set of immediate possibilities that are within reach from where we are today, to help create the desirable world we long for. That’s why we need Thrutopias.

Coined by Rupert Reed, Thrutopias are both indicative and suggestive. They lay out a map and articulate the core ingredients of a world worth aspiring to. Rather than sidestepping complex challenges, a thrutopia works through them head-on. As Reed writes: “We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul. Visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.”

Thrutopia is at the heart of my art and design collaborations with leading regenerative organizations such as @regenerators.co, Really Regenerative, and Arising Quo. They waymark the world between worlds — between the unraveling of modernity and the more beautiful futures our hearts know are possible.

Working with essence and energy, I create images that approach our times through the lens of archetype and myth. Using old magazines and books, the collages gesture towards what it feels like to inhabit thresholds, hold dualities, co-inhabit place with our more-than-human kin and evolve alongside them.

If you’re in Berlin on May 29, attend the vernissage from 18H, with a welcome address by me and @cspaceberlin co-founder Katja Hellkoetter.

RSVP via the link in bio! This allows you to add it to your calendar and us to know how many of you to expect.

The exhibition is part of @artspringberlin 2026, a yearly festival that celebrates art in Berlin Pankow. C*SPACE is excited to present selected works by four artists from its hub community, kicking off the Weekend of Open Ateliers with the vernissage of “Thrutopia” by Niels Devisscher. by @nielsdevisscher

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5 months ago

I like to believe that the attentive eye can make the bluebells bloom.

I like to believe that your fingertips can feel the future as you trace them along the trunk of an ancient tree.

I like to believe that those who came before us whisper riddles through windblown trees and awaken our hearts by the dying of a bird you didn’t know you loved.

Analog Photographs and text by @nielsdevisscher by @nielsdevisscher

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6 months ago

What Would Love do?

This week, I hospiced a crested tit. He taught me about grounding in what is real, about responding in ways that a situation and another living being call for.

Click the link in my bio to subscribe to my Substack for more essays. by @nielsdevisscher

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6 months ago

Yew trees live millennia, and have long symbolized death and renewal.

When we set out westward to Kenburn Castle, we were still oblivious to the havoc she would soon create. On our way back hours later, we would be stuck in a flooded river, the engine's splash shield water-soaked, dragging against the asphalt.

We arrived at the visitor’s centre. Rain poured down heavily, and the trees blew back and forth in 80 km/h winds. Storm Amy had arrived, putting nature to the test. I didn’t want to leave empty-handed, and urged Rūta and my mother-in-law to visit two ancient yew trees. Enclosed by a metal gate at the bottom of the park, these elders are believed to be between 1,000 and 1,500 years old. While all other trees billowed in the wind, this duo stood strong. Their long, overhanging branches provided somewhat of a shelter against the heavy rain.

Yews are confounding in many ways. Their lifespan is one of millennia. They don’t just make us humans feel young; they defy the very methods by which we measure their age. For when a yew reaches 400-500 years, it starts to hollow, and counting growth rings becomes practically impossible. When wet, the wood on its inside “has the color and appearance of a flayed animal,” writes Jane Gifford, “and appears to bleed when cut — qualities that greatly enhanced the sacred reputation of the yew.” Both deadly poisonous and able to grow roots from their ground-touching branches, the yew has long symbolized death and renewal in Celtic and later, Christian tradition.

--- this is an excerpt from a forthcoming essay on the mythology and mysticism of trees. Stay tuned and follow me on Substack to read it first.

#yew #magictrees #mysticaltrees by @nielsdevisscher

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10 months ago