Benedikt Terwiel explores the technological and methodical developments connected with the cultivation, appropriation and production of land. In his work he explores how these processes and their results are reproduced in images and he researches the cultural historical narratives the processes are associated with. An important reference for his practice are several long distance walks Terwiel undertook from 2005 to 2012 throughout Europe. The last route aimed at researching “the natural human habitat” and lead from Berlin to Rotterdam.
For his 2024 EMAP residency project LAND BEFORE LAST Terwiel will return to Rotterdam and it's harbor and look at this area as a highly industrialized and densely populated environment with advanced technological infrastructures and an extremely designed landscape. LAND BEFORE LAST will deal with the way technology changes how we see the world we live in and how perceptions of natural and artificial can become fluid. Terwiel will explore the impact of industrialization and human intervention and the traces it leaves on our planet. He creates alternative perspectives on our civilization by looking at it through new scientific, technological and temporal lenses.
Terwiel will be collaborating on the text for LAND BEFORE LAST with musician and artist ANOHNI. ANOHNI is an artist and musician based in New York City. Her recent album, My Back Was A Bridge for you To Cross (2023) issues the challenge “It’s Time To Feel What’s Really Happening.” ANOHNI has had solo exhibitions at The Kitchen, New York; Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen; Kunsthal Bielefeld, Germany; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. With her group Antony and the Johnsons, ANOHNI performed with symphonies and in opera houses around the world including Sydney Opera House, Royal Opera House London, Teatro Real in Madrid and Carnegie Hall in New York.
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In Dialogue: Artist Talk with IMPAKT:
IMPAKT: Before we dive deeper into the work, could you tell us what you envision the final work to look like?
Benedikt Terwiel: My work LAND BEFORE LAST will be a black-and-white film installation, recorded in a digital terrain model that has been created from land survey data. It will portray a region of the western Netherlands from which all buildings and facilities apart from their imprint on the topography have been removed. The film will explore this wide deserted field of nameless traces, whose anonymity and timelessness make it appear as ruins of a dystopian future or an archaeological site from a long distant past.
IMPAKT: Which parts of LAND BEFORE LAST will you be working on during your residency at IMPAKT?
Benedikt Terwiel: I will mostly research and visit the locations that the film is focusing on. As the film is shot in an entirely digital environment, I need to see what you experience when visiting the actual sites. It will certainly influence decisions made in the further development of the film but also in its potential understanding and narrative.
IMPAKT: LAND BEFORE LAST explores the impact of industrialisation and human intervention. What interests you about these topics?
Benedikt Terwiel: When I did several long distance walks in Europe between 2006 and 2012 I first experienced the expansion of our human habitat. Passing through our everyday landscapes of cities, industries, rivers, and high-ways, through centers and peripheries, gives you an idea of the size and extension of the man-made environment and puts it in relation to the scale of your own body and its physical limits. The dimension in which human civilisation is transforming the planet is shocking.
The erasure of all buildings in the human environment and of all life seems above all to be an erasure of its history. It leaves behind a bare and mute terrain, an anthropocene relic that needs a poetic fabric and/or a soundscape as its new narrative.
IMPAKT: For this work, you will be collaborating with musician and artist ANOHNI. What will be her input in this project, and how did this collaboration come to be?
Benedikt Terwiel: ANOHNI, whom I have known since her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bielefeld in 2016, will develop this part of the film with me together. Her contribution will help to break through the stasis that dominates the images and makes them conceptually otherwise too impenetrable.
IMPAKT: In the announcement of this residency, the work was connected to the Dutch infrastructure and extremely designed urban landscape. What makes this landscape so fascinating to you?
Benedikt Terwiel: The Netherlands have a long tradition of land development and terraforming as well as a legacy of works that relate to it. I have visited some of the sites like the Robert Morris Observatory, Robert Smithson’s Broken Circle/Spiral Hill and Marinus Boezem’s Groene Kathedraal. The economic connection between Rotterdam and the Ruhr Area, which comprises one of the largest industrial regions, as well as the fact that the Netherlands ranks as one of the most globalised countries in the world makes it conceptually interesting for my purpose of portraying these traces of the Anthropocene on the planet.
IMPAKT: There’s something ominous and maybe even apocalyptic about the title LAND BEFORE LAST. Can you tell us more about the meaning of the title?
Benedikt Terwiel: The title suggests a timeline in the landscape in an almost biographical sense – an age before a closing future. It resonates with a subtle form of the disappearance of memories.