Under Erasure
Installation at Experimental Art Space 1646, The Hague
November 2022
Installation at Experimental Art Space 1646, The Hague
November 2022
The seeds of the “wood that weeps” were smuggled from the Amazon to Southeast Asia, where old forest communication networks were destroyed to make way for rubber plantations generating silences that would linger for generations. Meanwhile, filmmakers passed by and revealed themselves through the images they produced. A female character was fabricated and later removed from a film, leaving only the nitrate filmrol as a material witness to expose her disposal.
Rubber Falls Into A Form multiple projection video installation, sound
Trees and other witnesses are evoked in poetic forensics across time, connecting dots between the intimate histories of rubber, exploitation of women, early Dutch cinema, and other narrative machines which shaped and erased the experiences of those who produced the profits of the Dutch 20th-century plantationoscene.
Two Scenes Which Were Removed From the Movie Rubber single screen video installation, sound, HD 16:9, 15’48 loop
Six women silently read and then describe the content of the deleted scenes from the Dutch pre-war fiction film Rubber. The original content of these scenes, of which the omission went unnoticed in cinema history, was recovered by the artist when she discovered a forgotten original dialogue transcript. The scenes are reconstructed only through the women’s subjective descriptions. In doing so, the work proposes resistance to the gendered violence of the original content and representation of women and offers glimpses on how these travel across generations.
About the project:
Under Erasure is part of my ongoing research project Missing Scenes. This artistic research was prompted my discovery of the removal of scenes from a 1930’s Dutch film set on a colonial rubber plantation in Sumatra. As I started to investigate the removal of a particular female character, my inquiry opened up to a layering of historical silences related to women and profit models within the system of rubber production in the early 20th century.
Supported by: Gemeente Den Haag, Fonds 1818, Stokroos Foundation, Danish Art Foundation, Tijl Fonds, Eye Film Museum, Institute for Sound and Vision, near/by film, Stroom, 1646.
Rubber Falls Into A Form multiple projection video installation, sound
Trees and other witnesses are evoked in poetic forensics across time, connecting dots between the intimate histories of rubber, exploitation of women, early Dutch cinema, and other narrative machines which shaped and erased the experiences of those who produced the profits of the Dutch 20th-century plantationoscene.
Two Scenes Which Were Removed From the Movie Rubber single screen video installation, sound, HD 16:9, 15’48 loop
Six women silently read and then describe the content of the deleted scenes from the Dutch pre-war fiction film Rubber. The original content of these scenes, of which the omission went unnoticed in cinema history, was recovered by the artist when she discovered a forgotten original dialogue transcript. The scenes are reconstructed only through the women’s subjective descriptions. In doing so, the work proposes resistance to the gendered violence of the original content and representation of women and offers glimpses on how these travel across generations.
About the project:
Under Erasure is part of my ongoing research project Missing Scenes. This artistic research was prompted my discovery of the removal of scenes from a 1930’s Dutch film set on a colonial rubber plantation in Sumatra. As I started to investigate the removal of a particular female character, my inquiry opened up to a layering of historical silences related to women and profit models within the system of rubber production in the early 20th century.
Supported by: Gemeente Den Haag, Fonds 1818, Stokroos Foundation, Danish Art Foundation, Tijl Fonds, Eye Film Museum, Institute for Sound and Vision, near/by film, Stroom, 1646.