Christian Van der Kooy is one the finalist of Urbanautica Institute Awards 2019. His series 'Anastasiia' was featured in the catalog of our annual awards. We feature here the conversation we had at the time with him.

Chris could you please tell us about where you grew up. What kind of place was it? And then photography. How it all started? What are your memories of your first shots?

Christian Van Der Kooy (CV): Until I became nine years old we moved every three years to a different part of the Netherlands, before settling down in the forest-rich central part around Arnhem. My mother was a primary school teacher and my father a steward on the Middachten estate, a Dutch heritage site. His company managed and supervised the castle, forest, park and gardens for the 25th Lord of Middachten; exercising stewardship on lease, taxes, forestry and gamekeeping. Growing up close-by these premises took me on a journey, from orangery to haystack, cellar to attic, and showed me how the perceptions of houses and places shape our thoughts, memories and dreams. In retrospect, it showed me how I look at landscape, at nature and culture.

A precious memory is making some pictures in the parked DAF600 car of my grandfather. Him photographing me while I firmly hold the steering wheel standing on the driver's seat, and me photographing him smiling for the camera. I must have been four or five. After he passed away I inherited his black top hat from the wedding which I didn't know still existed, but instantly recognized from a framed black-and-white photograph on my mother's desk. When trying to fit it on I realised his head was much smaller than mine. The top hat gave me the focus to relate again to the surroundings of my grandparents' home and garden, with the red squirrels and cooing pigeons. What I fundamentally learned from my grandfather is the pure love of just wandering around in solitude, trying to pin down the spirit of place.

What about your educational background? How do you relate to this? Any takeaways? Any meaningful courses? Any professor or teacher you remember well?

CV: I graduated in 2006 from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. During my study, I had the privilege to work with and assist my documentary photography teachers Raimond Wouda and Guus Rijven. They both encouraged me to change my gaze, do substantial literature research and formulate my questions before taking out a camera. They conveyed the sensual riches of a 4x5" negative, and described the camera as an omniscient observer making people and environment merge. I became excited about experimenting with the height of the camera-eye, beyond normal human perspective, because it allowed for renderings of a deeper and more lyrical exploration of landscape. It still thrills me that they made sure I will never again see ordinary places in ordinary ways.

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking? How is the language evolving and impacting daily life of people and communities in your opinion?

CV: Humans have always lived by stories; everything we know is a story. About our relationship to the environment, about our relationship to each other. And, as any historian could confirm, every culture, every civilisation has been built on some kind of narrative structure. Our present (digital) world is no different. It is shaped by stories, whether or not it has an evanescent touch of whimsy that is lost in translation. It's a habit for humans to use story to become part of something, to belong somewhere. Our brains are still ‘wired’ for stories. We need stories to ground ourselves. We need them to engage with the globalized network societies we live in.
Narrative still has a great power in this world. It can inspire us, urge us for action, enables us to imagine new possibilities, for social organisation and for personal development: it is the potential of fiction to intervene in our understanding of our social world and our perception of opportunity for action within it.

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

I am confident that fiction, subjective documentary, has relevance – even utility – in addressing the overwhelming acceleration of change that is upon us. Fiction, ideally, should provoke us to question and challenge the everyday world we have been given. Poetry, installation-art, film and photography have a critical role to play in generating and embracing the process of change by which the future invades our lives. As it is impossible to see all details of a panorama within your field of vision, you're unable to fully see how it influences our experience of present society. In my work I hope to reveal a way of seeing and how I have learned to understand and ultimately feel what for me gives a story its identity and character.

Fast interconnections and instant sharing. How this is affecting the role of a documentary photographer and your own practice?

CV: «Perhaps instead of standing by the river bank scooping out water, it’s better to immerse yourself in the current, and watch how the river comes up, flows smoothly around your presence, and gently reforms the other side like you were never there.» (Paul Graham, A Shimmer of Possibility)

Technology plays an essential role in what I do and it transforms the way in which I interact with the world. My process of finding subjects and doing research is very much tied to the Internet. It gives me a place to get information and provides me with a matrix that somehow captured the invisible weave of culture. It gives me a destination, even before leaving the studio for the road.
Establishing interconnections in combination with for example the ​Instagram​ platform has the ability to combine formalism and detail together with action and the unexpected. It's what I enjoy to research more and integrate in my photography language. Consequently, because of platform structures nowadays, other voices will come through all the time, marking their territory with images and stories. I hope that this stream of stories will encourage something of value to stand out, as it has done for me, by taking the time to look and relook.

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

About your work now. How would you introduce yourself as an author or described your personal methodology? Your visual exploration...

CV: We hear it everywhere these days. It's time for a big sweep of narrative that becomes the myth of our times. A story which helps us fight through the discomforting changes that are upon us. A new story and everything's solved. Maybe but probably not. Judged by the current streams of storytelling, despite of the varieties and overwhelming presence of stories, the stories are coming up short.
I start my artistic research by recognizing this puzzling situation regarding ​story​: there is no shortage of storied information, of narrative material. One could even argue that we are blinded by the offering. So, perhaps, it is in the way stories are being told. Maybe the stories we need are already here, we just have to regard them differently? Maybe they have to be rediscovered and channelled differently?
My aim is to model a form of critical and creative discourse through visual and textual exploration of narrative constructs. The interplay of words and images give a story a kiss of life. The keynote of this process is to analyse and interpret reality by creating a new context. Sense of place lies at the heart of my artistic practice. It makes me smile if my work has provided the occasion for new, ingenious, and focused reflections to viewers and readers.

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

Can you introduce the work 'Anastasiia' that was shortlisted or Urbanautica Institute Awards. What are the basic motivations and assumptions of this project?

CV: My proposition is to reinforce narrative as vehicle that helps us anticipate change. Anticipate transformations. Whether they are social, economic, scientific or religious, we are dealing with the absence of an applicable attitude towards story, not with an indispensable loss of it. In the wake of this proposition, my intention is to revive the re-imagining of the world through storytelling.
However subjective the outlook, I believe that the only subjects that embody change are moving in long, very long time spans – relationships, landscapes and the history of society. In the time when people demand new narrative I want to pose the question of how to read and interpret the landscape of Ukraine through the eyes of a Ukrainian woman. I consider the complexity of the reciprocal manner in which a person engages with a landscape from a variety of personal (​emotional​) and social perspectives, and wonder if we'll ever be able to recognise and overcome our bias.

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

The intention of the story is to share the personal empowerment of Anastasiia through a narrative-driven dialogue with her lover, the photographer. Their conversation is not about the outcome but an end in itself. By articulating in greater depth the ways of seeing and being in the landscape, she tells a story of encounter and experience, a mode of inhabiting the world.

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

Anastasiia is above all an insight into Ukrainian everyday life through the lovers’ intimacy. Emotion and sense of place form an ontological basis for the human capacity to experience meaning. This is part of our ordinary bodily experience, the means by which we touch the world and are in turn touched by it. The dialogue in Anastasiia represents a universal story: that individuals interpret their surroundings differently and that it remains uncharted territory to analyse their own experiences and perception. The establishment of your personal identity, your self, raises existential questions on the relationship with the other. How well do I know the person with whom I have a relationship? Does the relationship with the other become a part of my identity?

The project developed into a book. Tell us about this experience... And how in your sense the book digested your intentions?

CV: Can Ukraine be understood by anyone person at any moment in time? By me as a foreign photographer? By Anastasiia, born and raised in Kyiv? I don't think Anastasiia, She Folds Her Memories Like A Parachute​ is more than an attempt to come to grips. To be able to see it in other ways: twisted, sparked, flipped; and to understand and feel that Ukraine is changing, gradually gaining momentum.

The crucial moment the book came together was when I realized that it is not me who holds the key to this story, but the protagonist Anastasiia herself. Our continuous dialogue granted us time to be quiet, to pause and reflect, come back to previous (mis)conceptions and make associations between my pictures and places dear to Anastasiia. She recognizes the layers of history, the anomalies, the good spots and the dark corners of Ukraine. The image and the other, me and Anastasiia, are essentially synonymous. That is, what remains is only our desire or the fantasy that thrusts us toward each other.

© Christian Van Der Kooy, Anastasiia, She Folds Her Memories Like A Parachute, Book

© Christian Van Der Kooy, Anastasiia, She Folds Her Memories Like A Parachute, Book

© Christian Van Der Kooy, Anastasiia, She Folds Her Memories Like A Parachute, Book

My first draft had uncropped pictures on both the left and right pages and no text. The sequence of Anastasiia was wobbly and much darker, but I edited out a lot of the voyeuristic material because it forced the reader to go astray (Soviet nostalgia, nudes...). They would have overwhelmed the sequence. The rhythm of the dialogue was translated into a dynamic design by graphic designer and publisher Rob van Hoesel (​The Eriskay Connection​). Together we rewrote my previously written storylines, placed new markers and introduced a prologue and epilogue to the story. Half of the photography is making the pictures and half of it is editing the pictures. Editing things out is crucial. Rob has been crucial.

© Christian Van Der Kooy, Anastasiia, She Folds Her Memories Like A Parachute, Book

© Christian Van Der Kooy, Anastasiia, She Folds Her Memories Like A Parachute, Book

© Christian Van Der Kooy, Anastasiia, She Folds Her Memories Like A Parachute, Book

As flattered as I am, Jörg did grasp my intentions in a way I couldn’t write myself: ​«The mix of the intensely personal with what one would consider documentary material in addition to the mix of two clearly distinct voices (that also try to make sense of each other) lends the book a dimension absent from many (actually most) other documentary photobooks I know. There is a
clear red thread running through the book, but it’s one of human uncertainty and of longing. It’s a book about life under specific circumstances, two people living their lives while being close to each other — mentally close when not being physically close.» (Jörg Colberg).

I like your statement regarding this series «In Anastasiia I define the landscape admitting it will always be subjective, just like the memories, as it is constructed in the present.» Can you develop for us this concept and the relationship with memory?

CV: How to define the Ukrainian landscape? Imagine we were drawing cognitive or mental maps of the landscape. These memory maps were not a test of knowledge but were intended to provide information about a place, places that mattered enough to include them in our maps. We regard these maps as personal representations of Ukraine, as being another way of telling and reimagining our surroundings. During this extended process of looking, or being looked back at, Ukraine became very much part and parcel of our own biographies and identities and we developed a deep affection and visceral knowledge of it. Much of this experience sits in bodily memory and is impossible to convey and recount in mere words or pictures; photography by its very nature is elusive. The irony of any exploration of embodied identities in landscape, and the subjective experiences of ourselves is that, as a critical and creative discourse, it attempts to capture that what cannot be captured: much is lost or transformed in the process.

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

© Christian Van Der Kooy, from the series 'Anastasiia'

The photobook, in this particular case ​‘Anastasiia, She Folds Her Memories Like A Parachute’, enables artistic interpretation, provides a constant framework, illuminates and creates awareness of the boundary between the picture and what is outside; the alternative world in the imagination.

You wrote that «In the current Ukrainian geopolitical discourse there is a quest to define and reflect on the cultural identity that embraces the mind-set of the generation born after independence (1991)». It's an interesting assumption. How do you feel your project impacted this debate and sociological debate? In other words how we can reduce the gap between artistic/documentary work and real society?

CV: That is very difficult to say, trivial really. In the first place, I'm an artist expressing my views through my works, not a pundit or key actor. It is not my role. The problem in this particular debate with "I’m entitled to my opinion" is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned, or are already abandoned by the people involved. I don't see a gap between my artistic practice and the real society as mentioned before. I do see a discrepancy in the society between the limited and contradictory changes (a feeling to be time-stretched; ​'un-socialist realism'​) and the energetic hands-on mentality of the generation born after independence. This generation presents itself in a desire to know more and shares the unique spirit of the landscape that is part of who they are. Ukraine feels like a laboratory on the verge of a breakthrough.

Three books (not only of photography) that you recommend in relation to the project 'Anastasiia' or your photography or your interest in general.

CV: Dark Mountain Issue 14 - TERRA; Silence and Image - Essays on Japanese Photographers by Mariko Takeuch; Rain - A Natural and Cultural History by Cynthia Barnett.

Is there any show you’ve seen recently that you find inspiring?

CV: I've recently seen 'Walled Unwalled' on the big screen during IFFR. It still sends shivers up and down my spine. The video is a meticulously scripted series of performances recorded in an East Berlin, Cold War sound effects studios; beginning with the story of an American teenage boy growing weed in his private bedroom, to Oscar Pistorius shooting Reeva Steenkamp, and ending with the torture prison Saydnaya in Syria. Lawrence considers how solid structures (walls, doors or floors) are unable to prevent the flow of information or to remain a barrier between private and public space. In the last part about Saydnaya he focuses specifically on the way in which the prison walls were engineered so that the torture of one inmate would be broadcasted to fellow detainees by way of reverberation.
Earwitness Inventory (2018) - 'Walled Unwalled' (single channel 20 minute performance-video installation) by Lawrence Abu Hamdan. Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam.

What are you up to ?

CV: I am still in the early stages of my research, but I can give a glimpse of my new project. I am researching the Ukrainian inherited landscape myths and memories of Crimea, while not setting foot on the peninsula. By conducting interviews, photographing and collecting pictures, I am trying to create a story of the past in the present. A story involving the representation of topography: the landscape, the sea, the sky, the sun; and integrate these features into a narrative of how it might have been. Into how it should have been?

---

LINKS
Christian Van Der Kooy (website)
Book 'Anastasiia, She Folds Her Memories Like A Parachute', The Eriskay Connection