For over twenty years, Theo Jansen (b. 1948, lives and works in The Hague) has devoted himself to the study of an independent and autonomous species: Strandbeests or “beach creatures.” Every summer, he transforms Scheveningen beach into a laboratory where these monumental creatures are deployed. Made solely out of electrical insulation tubing and sometimes out of bamboo-sticks, cable ties and Dacron sails, they are moved by the wind’s force.

The Strandbeests species are developed according to the principles of evolution and genetic transformation, thereby questioning the widely accepted division between the natural and the artificial, the organic and the mechanical, and creating a complex genealogy.

Theo Jansen rejects our spontaneous anthropocentrism and considers the Strandbeests as having their own rationale, their own mechanisms and evolutionary principles of which he is not so much the inventor as the conveyor and transmitter.