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With this installation, Hoogeveen and Hermans have expressed their admiration for the rough Normandy landscape, as Monet and other impressionists did before them through a series of paintings. It is remarkable how many video artists use technically high quality equipment to record and to honour the primaeval forms of nature. Not much has changed since Monet in the admiration of artists for nature. The biggest difference between painters and video artists lies in the possibilities that the latter have to actually record change in their work. Fascinated as he was by the duel between wind, water, land and rocks, Monet needed a whole series of paintings to show the changes. The Normandy coast is the scene of an eternal battle between the wind, the land and the water. Wind swept chalk cliffs stand on the dividing line between water and land. The clash of the elements leads to a combination of constant movement, of changing shapes; a play of light and shadow. The landscape as a living, illuminating body; that is how it is almost tangibly presented in this installation. Weit Hoogeveen: ''The problem was documenting the passing of time, of the difference between land and water, between ebb and flow.'' An ingenious solution was used: a rotating lens onto which light is projected. At the same time, images of the Normandy landscape are projected via a mixer. The effect is created depending on the projected images and the light registered by the lens - so an identical image never appears. A combination of lens and chance determines when the viewer gets to see which image. Hoogeveen: ''Without the technical equipment and the access to it, we would have had to think up an entirely different solution and it would have been a different installation. But, we have kept is as simple as possible. The audience sees, or feels the landscape as we felt it. There is an interweaving of the experience of the landscape with the space where the installation is set up.''
This installation is a cooperation project between two students at the academy of art. Did the cooperation never lead to problems- Hoogeveen has to laugh. ''Yes. We worked on it for a year and we sometimes had difficult discussions, as to whether we found something beautiful or not. Ultimately it became a sieve through which our ideas passed. It is something from both of us together. We are now working separately but we both have the idea of working together again in the future.''
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Eric van ‘t Groenewout
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