In 2023 I started a project that continues into the present. I move in the landscape and capture this in color with a mini drone that I can control myself. This allows me to do the work alone. This aspect is important in all my work. The camera feels like an extension of myself. I look at myself from the outside. As a human being I am my body, I am in my body and I am outside my body. By using the drone I have been able to achieve a major new shift in perspective. The camera moves off the ground, into the air. And it can also register my movements from a much greater distance than in previous work. In the stretched vertical film frame, the drone zooms out until my body almost disappears and the environment takes over the image. In each film the camera rises in a spiral shape around the subject: my increasingly smaller, rolling body on the ground. I move within the boundaries of Walcheren, a peninsula that is bordered on almost all sides by the coastline. By rolling over the land and repeating this movement countless times throughout the year (and into the new year), I make a desperate attempt to appropriate it. I leave my traces in it, not always visible and always temporary. Conversely, the landscape always leaves traces on me. Where my skin makes tangible contact with the ground, I am limited.
September 2024
made possible by Makersregeling Gemeente Middelburg