Xavier Ribas - Photographer

Installation of Greenhouse at the Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal, Leiden, March 2007. © Photograph: Olga Overbeek

Greenhouse is an installation about the changing landscape of Wieringermeer. It looks at one specific but significant location: the building site of a massive greenhouse that the agricultural corporation Agriport A7 is constructing near Medemblik, some 70 kms North of Amsterdam. The new structure is about eight hundred meters long and its surface is around 250.000 square meters. At the time of filming, in the site still stood the three original polder farms from the 1930s (one of them was already abandoned and half derelict) on which land the new structure was being built.

The large video screen shows a continuous, unedited, travelling shot from one end to the other of the greenhouse in construction. The camera scans foreground and background at a slow steady pace, as if by walking, capturing two kinds of buildings, two economies, two mentalities. On the small screen, the Mullers (the last of the three families who sold their land to Agriport) talk about their memories of the place: the landscape when Mr Muller’s family arrived in the polder in the 1930s, a wooden house they lived in when the German soldiers flooded the polder in WW2, the strawberries in the garden, a party on a Sunday afternoon… Their voices accompany us in our ‘walk’ past the greenhouse. They act as an aperture to the past of the place, while we contemplate the making of its future. Past and future compress the present into a very thin layer in the landscape, barely visible. Greenhouse focuses on this landscape in transition; it is a journey along the gap between two times

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Wieringemeer polder in North Holland was drained in 1930, before the completion of the Afsluitdijk, the dam that connects the province of North Holland and Friesland. The dam closed off the Zuiderzee, a salt water inlet of the North Sea, turning it into the fresh water lake of Ijsselmeer. In 1934 the land became usable and the first settlers arrived. The process of colonisation of the ‘new land’ was well thought out and structured. The design of the landscape, the design of the towns, houses and farms, functional and pragmatic (the aesthetics of the straight line), went hand-in-hand with the design of the social configuration of the polder. The aim was to create a 'productive agricultural landscape with villages', and its urban planning represented a modern way of thinking about agriculture as well as community life. A balanced distribution of religious backgrounds, class and ideologies was set in place. People were chosen from all parts of the country according to how well they fitted into this urban master plan, envisaged by the architect M.J. Granpré Molière and the Netherlands Institute for Housing and Planning (NIVS). Today, this social and economic landscape is changing rapidly due to the growth of urbanization, the industrialization of agriculture, the changes in the culture of leisure, the development of transportation infrastructures, and, last but not least, the reality of climate change. All of this raises the question of how much of this original landscape will remain visible in the near future.

Text in Spanish (PDF)

Greenhouse (2007), Channel 1, excerpt of 3:42 mins.

To view the complete videos online go to Paradox

Download instructions for gallery installation (Pdf)

This work is the result of an International Photography Research Network (IPRN) fellowship in Holland and it's part of the Changing Faces commission program dedicated to the theme of 'Work'.

Production: IPRN + Paradox
Producer: Bas Vroege
Project management: Olga Overbeek, Frank Ortmanns
Camera & editing: Jan Pieter Tuinstra
Sound: Thomas Blom
Special thanks to Lenie and Reinier Muller

DVD published by Paradox

"Spanish artist Xavier Ribas's dual-channel video further explores how much the lens-based arts have changed since "New Topographics." Half of "Greenhouse" is a 20-minute video of a slow, rolling journey between two ends of a massive greenhouse construction site north of Amsterdam. The footage is as aloof as a video camera can be: unedited, and offering nary a pan, tilt, or zoom. The other half of "Greenhouse" is an interview with two landowners who sold their property to the developers. They recall all manner of context and history, recounting the reclamation of the land from the water and the Nazi invasion during World War II. While the artists of "New Topograhics" relied almost solely on the poetic mystery of images to make their statements, Ribas offers both a poem and a reason for why it was made."

Video stills

Interview with Reinier and Lenie Muller (Pdf) - English

Entrevista con Reinier y Lenie Muller (Pdf) - Spanish

Work (Changing Faces), Veenman Publishers, Rotterdam 2007 ISBN 978-90-86900-65-7

http://www.let.rug.nl/polders/population/wieringemeer.htm

Google Maps shows location before building works begun