The land below the horizon
Notes 2010-2025 - Ilona PlaumAir for 10,000 Years
I had my first experience of beauty in the fourth year of my life. I was sitting with my brother in a little wooden boat that creaked and groaned with every rowing movement. My brother was the captain, I was the sailor, and he skilfully manoeuvred us back and forth through a long village ditch behind our house. At the end of the ditch, an exciting adventure beckoned. There was a small pond disguised as the big sea in which fat sharks swam and all kinds of sea monsters. A wet branch fished out of the ditch served as our harpoon.We were on a mission. However, even before we had covered any metres we heard someone banging on the window of our house. My mother was standing on the second floor, extremely nervous, waving frantically and ordered us to come to the shore immediately. Why on earth had we been so stupid to go rowing without a life jacket even though I wasn’t able to swim yet. I got upset and stood up, confused. I had never seen my mother this angry. The planks wobbled under my feet. My brother, also affected by my mother’s anger, began to row towards the shore, irritatedly and wildly. So ... there I went. Overboard. My head submerged.
Below under water, it was quiet. Mud with sunlight works miracles. It seemed to snow gold there. Everywhere I looked, I saw millions of tiny particles that absorbed the light from above and sent it sparkling in all directions. In warm shades of bright, golden light I slowly sank down. Here and there I recognised the leaf of a tree – twirling down at an extraordinarily slow speed. The world of fairytales paled in comparison. The gold, the light, the extraordinary slowness in silence, all this appeared to me to be a place that was much more real than what I had ever experienced so far. It was the experience of an ultimate sense of wonder that gave me wings, and provided me with air for yet another ten thousand years. At that moment, if it had been up to me, it was a place where they could have left me lying for another few hours.
When I stood on the shore, dripping with water, my socks soaking wet, and witnessed the consternation among the people around me – as by now my father and the neighbours had joined us – I just couldn’t understand them. I had experienced something incredibly beautiful. I had seen something wonderful.
Perceiving
My eyes are round and constantly in motion. They weren’t made to stand still. They explore, zoom in and zoom out. Unless I consciously stare or focus. But if I don’t and, for example, casually try to perceive my sleeve, I notice that my gaze keeps jumping back and forth between the outline, the edge of my sleeve, and the texture, the rhythm of the fabric. Time and again I experience an equal tension between defining a shape and its meaning, and the infinite number of small particles that unfolds as a new dimension within the shape. By zooming in on the tiny particles, that which contains them, falls apart. What remains is rhythm.Beyond the Paradox
Looking through the lens at the actions that I have carried out always gives me a fresh sensation. It is the sensation of a new, different perspective. An analogy that expresses this different perspective well is that of a hiker standing on top of a mountain. At the top, the hiker has a panoramic view of the valley below. For me, standing at a distance, being an observer and having an overview is similar to the position and significance of the camera. As soon as I’m making something, I enter into the valley, into the moment of the here and now, where I have no overview and thoughts about the future and the past. In the deepest recesses of the valley, it seems time and space don’t exist. Only the dimension of consciousness itself, in which I feel united with everything and everyone.Time Travel
In a historical museum, I’m standing in front of a display cabinet filled with ancient vases and pots. I carefully observe the ceramics. The vases and pots date from far before my birth. There is a distance of more than 2000 years between me and their maker. Seemingly unbridgeable. Then I look at the carved motifs in the baked clay. I see and feel the speed with which the maker’s hand has moved; there are still burrs along the drawn traces. The action can be felt so strongly, the sense of connection is so great, that time doesn’t exist anymore and I could easily shake hands with my early predecessor.Mirror of the Soul
Few things are as inspiring as a plant that is growing at full speed. Especially young cuttings with tiny leaves that all of a sudden go through a growth spurt. ‘Wow, that’s an eager one!’, I think. ‘She’s on fire’, my daughter shouts. It is bursting with vitality on all sides. It is contagious. It makes me feel too that I want to make the most of my day.But the opposite also happens. It makes me sad when a plant droops. I get worried when I see yellow leaves. I panic when a plant suddenly loses a lot of leaves and I don’t know whether it suffers from too much or too little water. ‘If only you could talk’, is what I wish in such moments. On an unconscious level, living with plants teaches me to deal with constant change, with the cycle of life and death, and, last but not least, to connect with them every day, simply by looking at and observing them.
Horizon
It was always there. The faraway horizon. The separation between sky and sea. All around, but always at a distance. Like an abstraction referring to a promise. With the eyes of a child, I stared at the boundless expanse around me. I could perceive the earth as an immense big ball wrapped in a dark-grey surface of water, on which I and my family bobbed around, lonely, as if the end of the world was our destination. But after a while, the horizon changed. On the left or the right, a hair-thin, dark line wedged itself between the sea and the sky, and it slowly became thicker and got irregular bumps. A line in which I later recognised the contours of the familiar houses, trees, towers and sheep.By the time I was five years old, my father had built his first sailing boat. For my father, the sea stood for adventure, peace of mind, and the wind in his hair. For our family, this meant that we spent all holidays and weekends on the water. For example, we sailed to England, Denmark and Norway, and we once visited the island Corsica in the Mediterranean Sea.
Unfortunately, I hadn’t inherited my father’s sea legs. I often lay in the gangway, bent forward, spitting until my stomach had been wrung out completely like a sponge. The fight against the nausea started as soon as we left the harbour. As I saw the trees and the sheep on the dyke become smaller and smaller until they had been reduced to a lifeless, flat line, an unpleasant heaviness began to take hold of me. ‘Go and sit against the mast’, my father said when I was a bit older, ‘the boat rocks the least there.’
As I sat in the middle of the ship with a twelve-metre-high mast behind my back and hardly any room to move, the nausea did indeed become less, but boredom set in. Surrounded only by water and sky, a monotony that could sometimes last an excruciating amount of time, I desperately clung to my imagination. For instance, I tried to recognise an endless procession of white animals amidst the celestial blue.
And if there was a lack of cotton-wool clouds, I scanned the water in search of curious irregularities, as they might indicate the head of a seal or the sign that a shoal of flying fish was coming. I fantasised about their colour, the size of their wings, whether they had beaks, and what kind of sound they made. In the end, it didn’t matter whether they appeared or not. I had already seen and imagined them.
Colour
Grey, that is what the Netherlands is. The country where I was born and grew up. Cloudy skies, soft tones, silver light, these daily experiences take me to faraway places in my mind, without having to blink to consolidate their depth. Somewhere deep inside, it has determined my set of strings. Could this be true for other people as well?
I remember an interesting colour experience, long ago, in a different part of the world. Sitting on a terrace in sweltering Acapulco, I ordered a bottle of Fanta. I was surrounded by a landscape dotted with shrubs on which pink flowers grew. This pink was so saturated, so bright, that my eyes had difficulty ‘embracing’ them. There were no intermediate tones or soft transitions. I could not connect the pink to the rest of the surroundings. The intensity made me dizzy. It repulsed me.
The Fanta came. To my amazement, this Fanta had a totally different colour of orange from the one I knew from the bottles in the Netherlands. This orange was just as intense as the bright-pink flowers on the bushes, while I remembered the Fanta colour in the Netherlands as being much greyer. You’d expect: the same logo, the same firm, the same drink. But on a different continent, with a different landscape, people longed for a different colour.
Depth Perception
Fifteen years ago, while making a photographic installation, I had a valuable experience that I often recall. To conduct an experiment, I had roughly covered one of my eyes with a bit of masking tape. That way, I wouldn’t be bothered by the parallax effect, I thought.
Working with one eye was very intensive. It took a lot of effort to spatially ‘grasp’ objects, to focus on them. For the first time, I experienced my eye as a muscle separate from my identity that can get tired and has its limits. But the greatest shock came the moment I was finished. The moment I started looking with two eyes again. My sudden depth perception came as a blow to me. My surroundings felt intimately close. My visual field was round and curved again. It surrounded me like a large bubble, inseparably. Everything resonated in such a lively, spatial, breathtakingly beautiful way. I felt much more energetic and realised once more that experiencing depth means much more than just a pragmatic insight about distance. For me, depth perception is therefore a physical, spiritual experience. It taps into feelings of connection, of engagement, of vitality, through the experience of literally standing in the world.
Black
In our home there is no window without net curtains. I like net curtains. Net curtains filter the busy outside world and emphasise the entering light. In the evening when daylight is gone, they have a different effect. Closing off the view of the boundless depth of the night enhances the intimate feeling of being sheltered inside.
In the summer of 2008, I stayed in a forest cabin of friends of mine, together with my brand-new family. The cabin resembled a huge aquarium. All walls were made of glass, except for one. My friends didn’t like curtains. There was not a single net curtain or piece of fabric to be found near the naked, glass walls. At the time, holding my seven-day-old daughter in my arms, nothing was so eerie for me as seeing the darkness set in every day. The forest surroundings with which I’d become familiar during the day were slowly swallowed up by the blackness of the night. After a while, nothing tangible was visible anymore: not a single tree, shrub or plant. Only the dark apparent emptiness that felt oppressive. But also, paradoxically, hopeful and mysterious. In this blackness, at the heart of the surrounding darkness, the whole world lay hidden: pregnant with limitless possibilities, waiting to be seen and born.
Encounter
At the age of twenty-two, I came face to face with Coatlicue, the mother goddess of the Aztecs, in the National Anthropological Museum in Mexico City. She was made of stone and around three metres tall. I was shocked. As a mother goddess, she didn’t look very heartwarming. She was monstrously big, built symmetrically, and on top of her angular shoulders there was a snake’s head with a strange crack in the middle. A necklace of bloody, chopped-off hands hung around her neck, and four large fangs stuck out of her mouth. A split tongue slithered forwards, hissing, frantically looking for blood. It was hallucinatory. Looking at the statue, its cold stone turned into a living presence. It was as if my own consciousness was standing there in front of me, swallowed up into the billions-of-years-old history of being. To be honest, I didn’t really know what was happening. I found it quite creepy, and, overcome by fear, I didn’t dare to look at the statue anymore.
Later, I read the accompanying sign that said that the symmetrical construction and the crack in the head had been consciously used by the Aztec artists. It was a formal device, as a result of which you as a viewer were constantly interpreting the angle. In fact, you could never ‘focus’, because a shift was constantly taking place in your brain: sometimes, the head folded in along the fold, at other times it folded out. The act of looking at a stone statue that had been standing motionless in front of you only a minute ago was transformed in this way into a physical, internal experience of dynamic and dark forces. The Goddess had crawled out of her stone snake’s skin and had come alive.
Colour
Grey, that is what the Netherlands is. The country where I was born and grew up. Cloudy skies, soft tones, silver light, these daily experiences take me to faraway places in my mind, without having to blink to consolidate their depth. Somewhere deep inside, it has determined my set of strings. Could this be true for other people as well? I remember an interesting colour experience, long ago, in a different part of the world. Sitting on a terrace in sweltering Acapulco, I ordered a bottle of Fanta. I was surrounded by a landscape dotted with shrubs on which pink flowers grew. This pink was so saturated, so bright, that my eyes had difficulty ‘embracing’ them. There were no intermediate tones or soft transitions. I could not connect the pink to the rest of the surroundings. The intensity made me dizzy. It repulsed me.
The Fanta came. To my amazement, this Fanta had a totally different colour of orange from the one I knew from the bottles in the Netherlands. This orange was just as intense as the bright-pink flowers on the bushes, while I remembered the Fanta colour in the Netherlands as being much greyer. You’d expect: the same logo, the same firm, the same drink. But on a different continent, with a different landscape, people longed for a different colour.
Depth Perception
Fifteen years ago, while making a photographic installation, I had a valuable experience that I often recall. To conduct an experiment, I had roughly covered one of my eyes with a bit of masking tape. That way, I wouldn’t be bothered by the parallax effect, I thought. Working with one eye was very intensive. It took a lot of effort to spatially ‘grasp’ objects, to focus on them. For the first time, I experienced my eye as a muscle separate from my identity that can get tired and has its limits. But the greatest shock came the moment I was finished. The moment I started looking with two eyes again. My sudden depth perception came as a blow to me. My surroundings felt intimately close. My visual field was round and curved again. It surrounded me like a large bubble, inseparably. Everything resonated in such a lively, spatial, breathtakingly beautiful way. I felt much more energetic and realised once more that experiencing depth means much more than just a pragmatic insight about distance. For me, depth perception is therefore a physical, spiritual experience. It taps into feelings of connection, of engagement, of vitality, through the experience of literally standing in the world.
Black
In our home there is no window without net curtains. I like net curtains. Net curtains filter the busy outside world and emphasise the entering light. In the evening when daylight is gone, they have a different effect. Closing off the view of the boundless depth of the night enhances the intimate feeling of being sheltered inside.In the summer of 2008, I stayed in a forest cabin of friends of mine, together with my brand-new family. The cabin resembled a huge aquarium. All walls were made of glass, except for one. My friends didn’t like curtains. There was not a single net curtain or piece of fabric to be found near the naked, glass walls. At the time, holding my seven-day-old daughter in my arms, nothing was so eerie for me as seeing the darkness set in every day. The forest surroundings with which I’d become familiar during the day were slowly swallowed up by the blackness of the night. After a while, nothing tangible was visible anymore: not a single tree, shrub or plant. Only the dark apparent emptiness that felt oppressive. But also, paradoxically, hopeful and mysterious. In this blackness, at the heart of the surrounding darkness, the whole world lay hidden: pregnant with limitless possibilities, waiting to be seen and born.
Encounter
At the age of twenty-two, I came face to face with Coatlicue, the mother goddess of the Aztecs, in the National Anthropological Museum in Mexico City. She was made of stone and around three metres tall. I was shocked. As a mother goddess, she didn’t look very heartwarming. She was monstrously big, built symmetrically, and on top of her angular shoulders there was a snake’s head with a strange crack in the middle. A necklace of bloody, chopped-off hands hung around her neck, and four large fangs stuck out of her mouth. A split tongue slithered forwards, hissing, frantically looking for blood. It was hallucinatory. Looking at the statue, its cold stone turned into a living presence. It was as if my own consciousness was standing there in front of me, swallowed up into the billions-of-years-old history of being. To be honest, I didn’t really know what was happening. I found it quite creepy, and, overcome by fear, I didn’t dare to look at the statue anymore.Later, I read the accompanying sign that said that the symmetrical construction and the crack in the head had been consciously used by the Aztec artists. It was a formal device, as a result of which you as a viewer were constantly interpreting the angle. In fact, you could never ‘focus’, because a shift was constantly taking place in your brain: sometimes, the head folded in along the fold, at other times it folded out. The act of looking at a stone statue that had been standing motionless in front of you only a minute ago was transformed in this way into a physical, internal experience of dynamic and dark forces. The Goddess had crawled out of her stone snake’s skin and had come alive.
Intimacy
My bedroom borders a large, enclosed garden surrounded by blocks of houses. There are a number of monumental trees in the garden, often inhabited by groups of starlings or cheeky, green parakeets. One of the large trees is in my own garden. In summer, when everybody has their doors open, you hear all kinds of domestic sounds. I love lying there, listening to them. People stirring in pans, talking, playing music. The sounds are not too intrusive, they come from a distance, so it would also be possible to shut yourself off from them. It reminds me of the past, of my aunt’s birthdays, when, as a child, I was put to bed in a bedroom next to the room where the party was going on. There was nothing so reassuring as falling asleep with the sounds of the familiar outside world in the background.
One summer morning, I experienced that you can sometimes be in the same twilight zone between waking and sleeping when you wake up. This time, it was not the cheerful buzz of the familiar voices of relatives, but an urban bird, unknown to me, that was singing. This bird was not too close and not too far away. In fact, the bird was at an indefinable distance; the sound was both here and there in the same moment. This indeterminacy gave me such a wonderful experience of my surroundings, as if I entered a transitional zone in which there was no inside and outside anymore. Rather, I had entered a zone of consciousness where the feeling of disconnectedness had dissolved, and where I experienced the outside world as if it were myself. This gave me a feeling of closeness and intimacy that I find incredibly poetic and that I often recall longingly.
One summer morning, I experienced that you can sometimes be in the same twilight zone between waking and sleeping when you wake up. This time, it was not the cheerful buzz of the familiar voices of relatives, but an urban bird, unknown to me, that was singing. This bird was not too close and not too far away. In fact, the bird was at an indefinable distance; the sound was both here and there in the same moment. This indeterminacy gave me such a wonderful experience of my surroundings, as if I entered a transitional zone in which there was no inside and outside anymore. Rather, I had entered a zone of consciousness where the feeling of disconnectedness had dissolved, and where I experienced the outside world as if it were myself. This gave me a feeling of closeness and intimacy that I find incredibly poetic and that I often recall longingly.