PHOTOGRAPHY | STATEMENT | BOOK AND PRINTS
Entitled Land and Traces, this series shows the dunes of Kennemerland with remains of bunkers. These are fragments or parts of bunkers left in the country. They have been partly absorbed by nature and have formed a kind of symbiosis.
It explores the story formed by the relationship between place, event and memory.
This work stems from my fascination with the nature of our relationship to our environment and that what we call landscape. The question what a landscape actually is and the emergence of self-evident fact that land can become property.
Beginning
This series emerged from the earler ‘Oorlogsbeton’ photoproject. This arose of the many remains of bunkers in the dunes of Kennemerland where I live nearby. With these defenses this area has witnessed horrific events and many people have been shot.
Now it is a beautiful nature area for walking. However, these bunkers tell a dark history. It was my goal to make sense to these phenomena that form a remarkable contrast located in my immediate environment.
During a drizzly afternoon, I was somewhat lost in the landscape, I came across a well-hidden bunker that layed like a sleeping monster in the dune overgrown with bramble. I looked around for a while, looking for the right view.
With little light and a gloomy atmosphere, I wondered what must have happened here in this place. Slowly it began to dawn on me what a horrible history lies here, what a terrible stories these bunkers tell. Besides feeling gloomy and with a feeling of abandonment, the environment also became eerie. Stories that go further than this war, deeper, because they tell how we treat land and thus telling our own story.
This created something that my photography should consist of: place, history and metaphor. Place was clear now. History is vague because I didn’t know all the stories and my image is unintentionally influenced by cinematic heroic romance.
The remains of bunkers became a metaphor for who we are and how we treat land.
The important broadening, or deepening, therefore consisted that I no longer could see these bunkers separately from their surroundings, but that they formed a whole with them and thus acquired a different meaning. This landscape reveals a past full of public and emotional memories and deeper secrets.
Photography
This went much further than photographically recordings of concrete structures built during the war. I discovered I was increasingly concerned about how the land was formed, the use of the land and the struggle that arises from the desire to own land.
Photographically it became part of the question that arose earlier during my trips through Scotland about what a landscape actually is and how to photograph it.
A landscape does not excist without stories and that makes my region more special. Also because these stories connect directly to recent history and conflicts.
This also turned out to be a striking bases for investigate these phenomena (landscape and land ownership) further as part of a photographic tryptich I am working on*. My assumption is that much is the result of due to changes resulting from the Neolithic Revolution. That may be seem far-fetched. But adapting to nature changed to adapting the land. Many of these changes forms the basis for the emergence of ownerschip and many conflicts. About land, about identity, about attachment, about inclusion and exclusion.
* part two will be about the bording area of Italy and Austria, part three is still unknown.
Remembrance
For me, the many bunkers with their concrete appearance form a strangely contrasting beauty in a peaceful nature. I think I was more fascinated by the madness to built hundreds of bunkers, than war questions like who was good and who was wrong. Here a strange mix of actual experience, memory and imagination arises. Is there still anything noticeable of the cruelty that took place there?
Resulting in these very questions:
Can the earth remember?
Can these dunes bear witness in some way?
There are physical traces, but are there also spititual traces? They are elusive…
Can photography challenge the spectator to go beyond the physical elements in these images?
Litteral traces will have been washed away, but is there such a thing as mental or spiritual traces? In this environment, physical traces are erased not only by humans, but also by nature**. But where does the uncanny come from that you can still experience here? The importance of metaphors and myths is for that which is intangible.
Most walkers pass carelessly and chatter along these remains that are often visible from the paths. It is therefore safer to stay on the paths.
An attractive thought-experiment: what would the world look like without us?
The remains of human presence, a future archaeology. Man has disappeared for whatever reason and this is the last visible thing before nature takes over completely. A hopeful idea too, perhaps a new life will emerge from it, a new attempt from a different form of intelligence.
** this in contrast to the Italian – Austrian borders where part 2 of this project will take place. The inventions in the rocky land have resulted in deeper physical changes and are still clearly visible.
Land and Traces is an ongoing project.