Land Art Live in 2015
Programme of artist interventions at Land Art sites in Flevoland
For the Land Art Live project, contemporary artists are invited to respond to the famous Land Art works that have been realised since the seventies in Flevoland, during the construction of this new polder in The Netherlands. Land Art Live intends to examine how these art works have become part of the social structure and oral history of this area, and how they play a role in the everyday life of the people who live around them. By pairing these large-scale, monumental and somewhat Herculean Land Art works with artists with an interest in sociality, temporality and performativity, the project also brings together two aspects of public art. Land Art Live started in 2013 and is building up to a final exhibition in 2016.
Sunday June 21, 15h
Rory Pilgrim at Daniel Libeskind’s Polderland Garden of Love and Fire (1997)
Artist Rory Pilgrim creates a highlight in his project Affection is the Best Protection with an open-air performance in the Polderland Garden of Love and Fire. In this project, he explores the relationship between “land” and “love”—inspired by Libeskind’s extraordinary Land Art work, which has for some time, and less famously, become used as a cruise spot. Since the launch of the project with a disco evening in October, Pilgrim has furthered Libeskind’s visual imagery of the Land Art work as a geographical compass, by engaging with community members and LGBT activists from Almere, Dakar and Saint Petersburg. On Sunday the 21, the voices and words of those people, whether present or absent, will come together to speak freely. For this project, Pilgrim has collaborated with local platform Roze Almere, choreographer Monika Dorniak and musicians of the Almere Youth Symphony Orchestra.
Rory Pilgrim (b. 1988, UK) completed a working period at De Ateliers in Amsterdam. His work was recently shown at the Hayward Gallery, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Andriesse Eyck Gallery.
Sunday August 23, 15h
Feiko Beckers at Piet Sleger’s Earth Sea (1982)
One of Piet Slegers’s objectives in creating Earth Sea, his Land Art work near Zeewolde, was to break the monotony of the Dutch polder landscape. The work creates swaying movements in the otherwise monotonous farming fields. Where most artists would indeed seek to break the monotony, Feiko Beckers is exploring the notion of bringing things back to normal and restoring flatness. For his performance Being surprised is admitting you were wrong, he will take on the Land Art work’s slopes and curves in an attempt to demonstrate that predictability is a good thing. Beckers’s performances are an unlikely combination of minimal sculpture and stand-up comedy, and place the figure of the artist in a force field of grand notions, daily decisions and the ever present possibility of failure. His battle with the slopes of Earth Sea will be played out over four acts that end—if all goes well—in song.
Feiko Beckers (b. 1983, The Netherlands) was a resident at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His work was recently shown at Palais De Tokyo in Paris, De Appel and Jeanine Hofland Contemporary Art in Amsterdam.
Practical information
The performances take place on the respective Land Art sites; for directions and more information, check landartlive.blogspot.com. Land Art Live has so far featured performances by Melanie Bonajo and Zhana Ivanova. The programme is curated by Martine van Kampen and hosted at Schouwburg Almere. We thank the Province of Flevoland and the Mondriaan Fund for their generous support.
Original Land Art sites: Robert Morris—Observatory (1977) in Lelystad, Piet Slegers—Earth Sea (1982) in Zeewolde, Richard Serra—Sea Level (1996) in Zeewolde, Marinus Boezem—The Green Cathedral (1996) in Almere, Daniel Libeskind—Polderland Garden of Love and Fire (1997) in Almere, Antony Gormley—Exposure (2010) in Lelystad.
