Daan Zuijderwijk

They could be called the results of experiments, those images that Daan Zuijderwijk seizes from the night. In the most remote and rugged landscapes of Europe, from Scotland and Norway to France or Spain, he scrambles his way into the darkness with his camera, tripod and equipment and heads for the promising spot that he had his eye on.

Then he frames the view, adopts a vantage point and opens the shutter. Usually for about eight minutes, but sometimes for an hour. During that time he makes his interventions in the darkness, allowing colored lamps and laser pens to stroke across trees and boulders. The woods, the mountain, the cliff, the valley produce extraordinary and strange images; they have been transformed. That is how his images take shape, by means of an inspired and thought-out performance in the night.

If this work is an experiment, then what does Zuijderwijk want to find out? What is at stake? We're looking at the results of a genuine attempt to establish contact with the forces in nature that are truly foreign to us as human beings. A desire to encounter the interrelationships of earth, plants and animals from which we as people arise and on which we continue to depend. Nature has the entire human world in its hand, surrounded by the black, cold universe. But most people live in systems that run solely on what people know, want, must do, can do and build. With all the disastrous consequences that this entails.

The endeavor that has resulted in this work is anything but noncommittal. Over the past five years Daan has, with his partner Maaike and their daughters Fenna, Alba and Isolde, extricated himself from most human systems. With a tiny house on wheels they venture through the mountains and woods that can be seen in Daan's images – even in the Swedish winter, so that they can witness the migration of reindeer with native Sámi shepherds.

For Daan and Maaike it is logical that their choice of this way of life stems from a profound longing for discovery, for that encounter with the more-than-human. It isn't easy. And it requires the practical provision of heat and light, water, food and hygiene. Providing care for the children and their education, for the emotional balance in that family living in close quarters. Dealing with the people and communities they meet during their travels. All of those things go hand in hand, along with the making of art and seeking of a remedy for our relationship with nature.

Daan's work thereby directs the gaze at ourselves as well, at our dependency on technology and at our difficulty in looking beyond the human dimension. His way of life shows that the loss of convenience does lead to more intense experience and more time. His images show that such an encounter involves interaction, chemistry. It demands responding, with one's imagination, to the things and people encountered.

This is why Daan Zuijderwijk goes into the night, like a modern medicine man, who makes contact with the forces that live in the animals, the woods and the mountains, but just as much in our dreams, myths and artworks. We may observe over his shoulder, and can come a step closer. 

Text: Dirk van Weelden
Translation: Beth O'Brien