Michel Banabila’s Soundtrack for Letting Go

Last week I had a meeting with electronic music composer Michel Banabila discussing a possible collaboration.
On his way out I handed him the video “Letting Go”, a film made with a small video camera attached to a pigeon. The sound in the original version consisted in flapping of pigeons wings and the grainy sound of wind.
Only five days later Michel did send me his version of the film and soundtrack. The flapping of the wings can still be heard and the depth of “abstract” sounds affects the video in a dramatic way.

Watch and listen to the new version here

Michel Banabila’s soundtrack “Letting Go” is also available as a free download here

Letting Go

In 2008 I was asked to participate in a project on the railway development in the city of Delft. After 20 years of debate the decision to tunnel the train and the station was finally made. I was asked to document the current situation.

I am living close to Delft, 6 miles crow in Overschie. Standing next to the railway in Delft, it is pointed south, straight in my hometown’s direction. Frome there,  the shortest way home is flying over the railway.

One of my close neighbours is a pigeons fancier. He keeps almost 200 pigeons. Every week, from spring to fall, they are competing in long distant pigeon flights from France and Spain.

Julius Neubronner, a german doctor living in Bavaria in the years prior to World War 1, experimented in his days with small camera’s attached to pigeons. Truly remarkable considering the size of camera’s and the technique of controlling a shutter in a pigeons flight.

These days it is easy to find a webshop selling small videocamera’s. I bought one and had it seized by my neighbour: “small enough to be carried by one of the pigeons” he said.

So I had it attached to a young male pigeon with sharp eyes. After some try-out flights from his dovecote, I travelled to Delft and released it from a high building close to the railway. It went of and did not bother the railway development for a second. It circled the high building and flew eastwards…

Read more on the excellent BLDGblog:  birds eye view

 

Zó Hollands, ons landschap in de kunst sinds 1850 / A Portrait of Holland:

HAARLEM.- A green polder countryside with cows, ditches, farmhouses and windmills, boundless vistas, vibrant bulb fields and panoramic river and dune landscapes: every facet of the Dutch landscape can be seen this summer in the exhibition A Portrait of Holland – The Dutch Landscape in Art since 1850 in De Hallen Haarlem. More than a hundred and twenty paintings, watercolours, prints, photographs and films by Dutch artists like Anton Mauve, the Maris brothers, Piet Mondrian, Jan Toorop, Jan Sluijters, M.C. Escher, Jan Wolkers and Jan Dibbets epitomize the fascination of the Dutch landscape.

The large summer exhibition in De Hallen Haarlem reveals the way that the seemingly simple, flat Dutch landscape of polders and rivers has inspired an incredible diversity of interpretations. It examines a number of movements in Dutch painting since 1850—from the Hague School to Expressionism—and also explores the work of photographers and filmmakers.

Easels in the Polder
Around 1850 Dutch artists felt a growing need for direct contact with their own familiar Dutch surroundings. Inspired by French Realist and Impressionist examples, for the first time in history large numbers of Dutch artists set up their easels in the polders; they wanted to experience and picture in all weathers their own landscape with its meadows, mills, cows, canals, rivers, dunes and church towers. Among the artists of this period featured in the exhibition are Piet Mondrian and the Hague School painters J.H. Weissenbruch, P.J.C. Gabriel, the Maris brothers, Anton Mauve and Willem Roelofs.

New Approaches to Reality
From the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards, new styles like Pointillism, Cubism and Expressionism determined the way the Dutch landscape was depicted. Dutch painters like Jan Sluijters, J.B. Jongkind and Leo Gestel experimented with new approaches to reality. Alongside works by these artists, A Portrait of Holland will also showcase more recent art by Edgar Fernhout, Eugène Brands, Jaap Hillenius, Jan Wolkers and Ben Akkerman. They expressed their personal observations of the landscape in what are by and large highly abstract works.

Manipulation
Manipulation is another aspect explored by the exhibition. There were and are artists who bend and distort the landscape to confuse and astound—like M.C. Escher with his perspectival games, like Paul de Kort and his land art, Sjoerd Buisman’s manipulation of vegetation, Jan Dibbets’s collages of landscape photographs, and the photographic works that disconcert the viewer by Barbara Visser and Gerco de Ruijter. Film images
from Bert Haanstra’s Spiegel van Holland (1950) round off the exhibition.

Uitnodiging voor de tentoonstelling Zó Hollands in Museum de Hallen in Haarlem.
Opening donderdag 23 juni om 17:00:
UitnodigingZóHollands
En het persbericht bij de tentoonstelling:
PersberichtZóHollands