On the morning of 8 February 2009 it was still pitch dark when we arrived with cameraman Fijko van Leeuwen on a wide stretch of the beach near the extremity of the port of Rotterdam. The tide tables had decided the day. As the freezing sky gradually lightened, a line of lights out to sea revealed itself as a queue of mighty ships waiting to unload goods and raw materials brought from all around the world. Meanwhile, we awaited a bulldozer, a hydraulic platform, our fellow co-curator Theo Tegelaers, and an artist whose work has been associated with the Land art and Conceptual art movements since the 1960s – Jan Dibbets. Thus Latitudes’ project
Portscapes commenced in earnest, and that morning saw the realisation of Dibbets’s
6 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective, a 2009 realisation of a work the artist had first made forty years earlier, almost to the day. Just after midday, both the shape drawn by the bulldozer as the tide rose and the gaggle of visitors who had come to witness the
filming had vanished. We drove back together into a snowy Rotterdam for bowls of warming soup.
One foot in the past, in the form of an echo of one of the seminal moments of Land art, strode into presentness of experience and, moreover, the imagination of the future – the beach where we had stood that chilly morning would soon no longer exist, effectively “correcting” the Dutch coastline forever, as Tegelaers
explained. With the construction of 2,000 hectares of new land in the North Sea, a project known as Maasvlakte 2, it would be swallowed up by the extension of what was already the largest seaport and industrial area in Europe.
Between March 21 and April 17, 2024, Dibbets’
6 Hours Tide Object... will be screened at the
Fundación Díaz-Caneja, a contemporary art museum in Palencia dedicated to landscape, the environment and rurality.
The 8 minute-long film was premiered at the FutureLand Information Centre of the Port of Rotterdam in June 2009 and during Latitudes’ participation in the New York festival
No Soul For Sale – A Festival of Independents (24–28 June 2009).
Portscapes was produced by the
Port of Rotterdam Authority in collaboration with the sadly now-defunct internationally operating Dutch cultural organisation SKOR | Foundation Art and Public Space (1999–2012).