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Imagine the opening scene of a murder mystery. The camera glides through a forest landscape, moving past snapped branches and dry leaves. Something obviously happened here. The detective enters the scene, searching for clues. But where is the victim? And is the detective entirely innocent themselves? For Parched (2024), a video installation about the murder of a landscape, Marijn Dijkmeijer (1995) found inspiration in an essay by Timothy Morton. In this piece the philosopher compared ecological consciousness, i.e. reflecting on the impact of our behaviour on the environment and the climate, to film noir. In this genre, detectives are often far from innocent bystanders, but shadily involved in the case themselves. With this information in mind, Dijkmeijer invites the viewer to reflect on concepts like guilt, shame, perpetrator, and victim in the relationship between human beings and nature.
Dijkmeijer is fascinated by the stories people tell each other and themselves in order to understand the world. Her video installations shed light on such narratives. The artist works in the tradition of essay film, a genre that combines various registers, such as documentary film, fiction, personal reflection, and pamphlets. Also in a visual sense, Dijkmeijer’s work is an accumulation of various sources and styles, including drawing, photography, stop-motion animation, and video. For Parched she started with dry point etchings and then brought the static images to life in her animations. These visuals were combined with footage of a miniature landscape. This same landscape is also part of the installation, serving as a form of evidence.
Text: Sarah van Binsbergen
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)