Notes in the Margin of a Dutch Landscape

a publication from 'a future museum of the present'

As the first in a series of ‘outsider’ reflections on the Dutch Landscape, this book reflects on the state of ‘not knowing’, projecting an encounter with landscape in which things are ‘unknown’ or for which information is only partially available.  This project takes as its starting point traditions of ‘travel writing’ and in this case, passages taken from the science fiction novella “The Time Machine” by H.G Wells (1895). Within the Wells text, we are carried through a narrated account of an un-named ‘Time traveller’ who purports to have built a machine allowing him to travel into the distant future. What becomes of interest upon reading the book are the moments at which the time traveller engages in speculation about the nature of the landscapes and societies which he encounters based upon the knowledge systems which he carries with him, only then to acknowledge the limitations of those knowledge systems and their tendency to render his conclusions flawed or incomplete. These passages are presented alongside a series of unlabelled ‘non-places ’ within Dutch urban and rural landscapes as a means of giving expression to the limitations of the photographic gaze.