Hole

The work plays with scale and granularity in the way the documentation is presented. Without points of reference or a horizon, the viewer can never determine the size of the hole, a question that came up more often than any other. The video offers a blown-up close-up of movements in sand. Through poetic abstraction, the work tries to redirect attention toward the most bare concept of what a hole can be.

The few passers-by in that far off place saw at a distance a figure at work, and they would approach me. As if they were scripted, everyone asked the same question: ‘what are you doing?’, although they could clearly see what I was doing. I refused to give reasons. So very interesting, honest and intimate conversations occurred in that isolated location after overcoming the first impulse of people to possess explanations. I realized I had an uninvited audience, that what I was doing wasn’t just an action, but a performance.

Experimental video · 6 min · Sound: Jorrit van Rijn

I documented the experience by writing and presented it in the form of an audiobook — a narration using my own voice — in the installation space. I also produced a series of photographs consisting of one photograph of the hole the way I would find it each week and one of the way I would leave it after digging, always from the same un-referenced perspective. Finally, I made a video that takes the perspective of the hole.