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“One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes.”


Dionne Brand

Ten Thousand Years
Stolen Sun


60sqm hand dyed cotton, 
fibreglass tent-poles, 
Lambda Print series
Year: 2023




Cotton, perhaps the paradigmatic colonial cash crop, dyed with maize leaves gleaned after industrial harvest, a plant appropriated by colonial plantation growers from indigenous communities of what is now south and central America, blankets the landscape of large parts of Northern Europe, grown for the production of biogas. As a demanding mono-crop it is rapidly degrading the soil, creating vast food deserts, and propping up systems of urban, social, and extra-urban politics which are irreconcilable with an inhabitable planet.

The German auto industry argues that the expansion of biodiesel production implies green energy policy has been sufficient, meaning that the car, atomising engine par-excellence, can continue to be the determining means of transport, diminishing the potential for the radical change needed to give a liveable future a chance.

Here a large cotton drape dyed with a another, lays over the exhibition framework, casting yellow light throughout the space, which hosts photographic works documenting traces of lives, animal and human, in the surrounding industrial farm land: Crushed maize where a wild pig makes its bed, the eaten corn heads where rabbits have been, the spectators of horse competitions, and teenage groups at swimming holes backdropped by walls of maize, using what little spaces are available for collective use, survival, or leisure.
installation at Beetsterzwaag Triennial

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