Jan Dibbets: Robin Redbreast's Territory

Robin Redbreast's Territory (Roodborst territorium / Scuulptur) is a book that documents an installation that Jan Dibbets put up in 1969 in an Amsterdam park. With his camera, the author observed and captured the movements of a robin redbreast in nature. The book, which was published in 1970, is Dibbets’s only artist’s book and is one of the more important works of that time.

Reading a number of works on robin redbreasts, the artist learned about the bird’s habits and decided to expand its territory by setting up poles on which it would perch, thus establishing new boundaries of its territory. The bird thus participated in the artist’s work.

In 1967, Jan Dibbets gave up painting and began creating ephemeral installations in nature, which he then photographed. For the artist, an act is not an end in itself: he is most interested in preserving the meaning of the work because he believes that what matters in the end is not the reality of the installation but the idea that inspired it.

Dibbets’s idea was to use his new understanding of robin redbreast’s habits for the concept of drawing in space and the visualisation of ecological systems. He realised he could not share his idea with others, that is, until he discovered the form of an artist’s book, in which he found the right means for its communication. From this point of view, the book is not only a document of the installation but also its physical conclusion. On the left-hand side of the slender notebook are photos and topographic notes, while, on the right-hand side, are the artist’s handwritten notes in three languages (English, French and German).