Camilio

BLOG 22.
Plant more trees. Make love, no war. Please use a condom!

On August 31, 2025, I went to KAdE in Amersfoort on the last day of the exhibition Imaginable Lives by Roy Villevoye. Among his works, one sculpture stopped me in my tracks: Reset (2016). It shows a young Adolf Hitler, twenty years old, homeless in Vienna in 1909, just rejected by the art academy. A figure of despair at the edge of choices. Seeing him, I wanted to shake him awake and give him a hug.

I stood before him wearing my “text suit” with the words: plant more trees, make love no war, please use a condom (21-5-2025, opening day of the exhibition). It was my message to him, but really a message for us today. A call for fewer people (less overpopulation — and no, the Nazi way of murdering people, genocide, is not what I mean), more trees, and a cooler planet. A call for love instead of war. A simple mantra pointing to the root of many problems: too much destruction, too much growth, too much forgetting of limits. All in favor of a happy few who want all the money and power.

I asked no permission. Not from KAdE, not from Villevoye. But sometimes art (and action/protest) is not about asking or getting permission. It is about stepping in, adding your voice, and letting the moment speak back.

Standing there, I thought about how history is made of choices. For Hitler, for us, for everyone. But today our choices are even larger. Wars rage in Ukraine, Gaza (genocide), Sudan, Congo, Syria, and many more places (was there ever a time without war since 1973?). More than ever, politicians rise on misinformation, anger, and fear. Meanwhile, forests fall, ice melts, and the planet heats up fast. And still we multiply, faster than the earth can carry.

The sculpture (one of the best I’ve seen in years, maybe decades) asked me to imagine a reset for Hitler — going back in time to tell him there and then. But I couldn’t stop thinking that what we really need is a reset for ourselves. Especially in the West, maybe worldwide, but let’s start in the Netherlands. First step: resist and stop normalizing the PVV, inform and educate the ultra–right-wing electorate. Not tomorrow, not someday, but now. A conscious choice to slow down. To plant trees instead of cutting them. To stop overpopulating (in the West especially) a planet already under too much stress. To cool the earth before it burns.

This is not just reflection. It is action we need. We cannot wait for leaders who promise lies or corporations who profit from destruction. Change begins with us — with how we live, how we consume, how we love, how we vote, and how we choose to protect or destroy.

Art cannot solve the/this crisis, but it can wake us up. And when we wake up, we must move.

I left KAdE with the words on my suit burning inside me: Plant more trees. Make love, no war. Please use a condom.

They are not just words. They are instructions.

They are, maybe in part, the needed reset.