Zwischenlandschaften 4 | Nabuurs&VanDoorn

Zwischenlandschaften 4 | Nabuurs&VanDoorn

Nabuurs&VanDoorn created a thirteen-minute looping monologue of a woman operating in a switch-system between occult and artistry, spiritual map-making and detective novel, black star and legend, and exotic dreams and close encounters.

The monologue is nutty and futuristic, but by bringing together imagery and a monologue comprised of anecdotes, notes and experiences collected from their research and creation process, the video creates a magical realist account that encapsulates Nabuurs&VanDoorn’s in-depth cerebration behind the project.

Zwischenlandschaften 4 presents a thorough investigation of the work of Swiss sociologist and economist Lucius Burckhardt (1925-2003); his contribution to the Triennial di Milano (1988) was a new production of A voyage to Tahiti (Kassel, 1987). His work was a search to answer the question; What do explorers explore? Or how the European mental construction shaped colonial landscape.

Through Nabuurs&VanDoorn’s research of his displaced dreamland, a term that interrogates traditional historical paradise, they asked; What do contestants contest? Or how a colonial mental construction destroyed the European landscape.

The locations depicted in the video include; a former crystal factory in Bovisa, of which Nabuurs and Van Doorn discovered it is designed by the futurist architect Sant’Elia; a dead zone in the North of Milan, where the living are not allowed to enter for another century; and water running out of the mouth of a dragon, typical for Milanese public space.

Nabuurs&VanDoorn’s video art is not virtuosic thrill-seeking but acts as a breakdown from everyday patterns. The “blur” in motion—can make it feel like an extension of Art’s strangeness. Its semi- autonomy is still something we need. If we’re lucky, it will do the work art has always asked us to do, which is consider the conditions of our world and help carve out the requisite space for contemplation.