‘Islands South of elsewhere’ for the Marker Wadden on the Markermeer, (2021, Piet-Zwart Institute, group project)
What: Literary research, field research, video making and editing, animation design, graphic design, prototyping, creative writing
Role: Researcher, director, editor, animator, designer, writer.
The second part of a site specific group research project focused on the human-built islands called the Marker Wadden on the Markermeer. Here, we started to imagine ‘How we wanted to build islands?’, where Marker Wadden inspired us to engage with the point of view of nonhuman subjects as co-designers. Recognizing that the state of our world today is based on human action, we are seeking for different habits, behaviors and other approaches to create space. Between escapism and rootedness we played with tools, as metaphors for a set of values and practices, we think ‘space making’ requires.
There are pragmatic and poetic arguments about why islands are somewhat uniquely special for us. An island is a body of land surrounded by water. An island's biodiversity really is different from that of the mainland. Stories of expeditions praising the heroic idea of colonizing remote islands inhabited by the yet unknown are still told. Islands are holiday destinations. Since they seem to be enclosed systems it's easy to misuse them as a laboratory.
While living through what is perceived to be one of nature's most intense crises in generations, we should rethink and reinvent our actions and enable more than human dialogues within space. Being on the Marker Wadden islands - currently under construction and full of life - gave us an insight of what is possible to imagine and what an impact the mere act of heaping up silt (the main material of the Marker Wadden) can have.
Group members: Agnes Tatzber, Bahar Orcun
Anyone who has spent even a modest amount of time with the mechanics of introducing new ideas, or tools, will tell you that the uptake only succeeds if the process of implementation is embedded into the fabric of what exists already in social and cultural terms. By using tools and techniques that are commonly used analogue we try to get closer to the idea of co-existence and collaboration. We do not look to the past nostalgically but we question if technology is always the answer.
Actually, all "past" analogue technology is totally "smart". In the video we are foreseeing a future in which it is a part of daily life to create your own island. For this future, we are designing tools, building manuals, laws and regulations.
How these tools and imagined future spaces look like can be seen here below.
During the project’s earlier research phase, we didn’t have acces to the Marker Wadden island due to covid restrictions, which led us in the direction of rather speculating on the phenomena we heard about the island.
As a way of both showing our fascination as well as our criticism of the human manipulations on land reclamation in the Netherlands, we made sense of the research and the phenomena we heard about Marker Wadden by composing them together into spaces on postcards - the chosen technique and form of visual storytelling of this project part. These postcards were created by real facts and research about the island, then a narrative was build around it with which a space was suggested.
The architecture we imagined here, is makeshift and yet somehow specific, pragmatic yet ceremonial as it originates from multiple unclear sources and points towards a speculative present and future. We took elements from everyday life and reformulate them, treating them as lexical units in a different syntax to disturb ways that we have learned, to see things, patterns, functions, and values.
The format of sending postcards enabled us to show fragments of our imagined reality in which we stayed figuratively and con conceptually for a long time. That’s why we send postcards during this creative journey to give the viewer insights of the experience which forced us to stay conceptual and create fake evidence.
Another earlier research part of the project was made in order to visually experience a part of our imagined islands from the postcards. This was done by using patches of imagery we collected from visual archives of the Marker Wadden and integrate them as one big 2D video collage.
During the final presentation of this video animation, the visitors were invited to use Oculus VR glasses to experience the landscape in 3D with 360 degrees image and sound.