User:Astrid van Nimwegen/ Draft 1st Chapter thesis

Everyday I record the same wide shot of a garage door. The video begins with the garage door closed; then the door opens as if the curtains of a stage open. A colourful Dutch landscape becomes visible. The atmosphere is quite melancholic and isolated, as if the drama already is there within the staging itself. The duration of the shot ensures that each element in the frame is given attention. A single leave blows away; the trees move slowly in the wind; the treetops in the distance are covered with morning sunlight. Then the door closes again after two minutes. On one day we see it raining, on another day it is dry but windy, sometimes a dog walks by.

Within the last years I developed a working method in which I mostly performed in my black and white videos, there was a certain strength and purity in those images and also my interest towards the complexity within our existence came clearly forward through my simple, minimalist video-registrations. I wanted to move beyond the performance videos [ i had been working with] and after my video piece recorded in 2010 called ‘the Gravediggers’ (in which I stood naked in a farming field while four man, dressed as gravediggers, digs a circle around me), I decided to step out of my videos and started to work more with other characters [how so?]. This was also the moment when I just had moved back to the island where I grew up and came to live in the middle of the Dutch polders, the influence of this flat, isolated landscape is clearly visible in my work. I think ‘the Gravediggers’ piece especially raised a lot of questions about theatre and staging on which I wanted to research further.

A red line in my methodology is that I always choose a frame in which every element is deliberate but by this I also create a space where ‘chance’ can take place. Somehow the chance becomes in this way also a deliberate choice. I recognize a structuralist side of my methodology in the creation of parameters behind my work. Next to this formal side of my methodology there also is a very strong intuitive side, and this latter is maybe the most important side that I truly want to follow and is closest to my heart as an artist.

So now I am back to my minimalistic way of working in which I play literally with the staging of the everyday and also with endurance and repetition. I use my intuition more to recognize the poetic, minimalistic portraits of the everyday and try to find a way to reveal the complexity of life through a very simple manner.