Single-channel video and sound installation

The landscape of Land before Last is based on data sets from the Dutch National Land Survey, which together form a terrain model of the country’s surface. What is unique is that all human development, vegetation and life of any kind has been erased from this topographical data, so that the traces of human settlement can only be recognised in the imprints they have left on the terrain. As a result, the landscape shown in the film appears as a vast archaeological site.

The accompanying soundscape and text by the artist and musician ANOHNI was created through conversations with Terwiel about the film’s material. Visitors follow ANOHNI’s voice as it moves through the space, drifting in different, sometimes associative directions, but it remains unclear where we are on the timeline and in which direction we are looking – the future or the past.

Patterns of walls, passageways, pits and plateaus – relics of human settlement – run like fossils through a landscape that may resemble the arid polar desert that the Netherlands prehistorically once was. Yet its topography of furrows and scars reveals the enormous changes that humans have made to the landscape over centuries of building, altering and expanding their habitat. It is no longer possible to say what caused their disappearance. But the erasure of all life in Land before Last feels like an erasure of history. We are experiencing a landscape of memory that has been stripped of its witnesses, of its narratives and histories. It is precisely this emptiness that calls us to reflect on what this seemingly unreal, but by no means fictional, landscape tells us about our present.

• Sektion Section: Exhibition
• Programm Programme: Witnessing Witnessing