AgriValley

AgriValley

‘At the age of seven, I walked into an unknown landscape for the first time: a greenhouse. All my senses were triggered by the heat, the humidity and the smell. I still remember this astonishment. More than twenty years later, I capture these unknown landscapes, depicting the tension in the scenery between man and machine.’ - Mirte van Duppen AgriValley is the result of long-term poetic research into agriculture in the Netherlands. The futuristic — almost dreamlike images — provide insight into the enormous impact of technical innovation in the Dutch agricultural sector. In her cinematographic representations, Mirte van Duppen brings together various production landscapes into a social construct, where appearance is ultimately determined by usage. Here, man and machine live and work side by side. Using associative analyses, Van Duppen depicts the contemporary landscape through image rhyme and essayistic camerawork. AgriValley made possible by: Creative Industries Fund NL, Impulsgelden Provincie Noord-Brabant, Kunstloc and Tilburg Makersfonds

at the Pennings Foundation

AgriValley is a long-term study comprised of multiple works and parts. This exhibition at the Pennings Foundation entails the five-channel video installation ‘New Gardens of Eden’. Landscape contradictions and amalgamations arise within the spatial video installation, with the interaction between multiple screens playing a vital role. With her ever-present wonderment and eye for detail, van Dupen fashions compositions of, in her eyes, sublime landscapes that hark back to her memories as that child of seven.

New Gardens of Eden

New Gardens of Eden five-channel video installation 16:9 full HD, 50p, 00:52 min 2022 ‘New Gardens of Eden’ illustrates the production landscape of the future. In this five-channel video installation, diverse landscapes merge into one whole. Indoors and outdoors, crops and animals, floriculture and food, man and machine come together in recurring images. Most of the elements used for modern agriculture are located on site and are interchangeable. The pink orchids connect visually with the pink LED light in the cultivation unit of the ferns. The yellow lines of the tomato greenhouse mirror the perspective of the architectural lines of the orchid greenhouse. The open-air cowshed, due to its construction, resembles a greenhouse. Further, the light and air by the asparagus grower corresponds to the sky by the cows. Even though man is not visible everywhere, he cannot be absent. Technology does not move by itself. While the labour may be distributed differently and the landscape shaped differently; zoomed out, the five different production landscapes form one singular horizon, that of the new Dutch landscape.