Tanja Engelberts

Exhibition view Rencontres d'Arles 2023

Mine, installatie gemaakt voor Rijksmuseum Twenthe

Decom Decom is a portrait of a decommissioning yard, the place where oil and gas platforms come to die. The huge structures are lifted from the sea and are broken apart, recycled and re-used on land. The film is devoid of any people; the machines have taken over to clean up the scraps of man. The scrapyard has its own flow, the film has the same rhythm, it is very slow and then all of a sudden there is a burst of violence. You also see this cycle at sea, when an oil or gas field reaches the end of production. Operators stimulate the field through fracking, it means the pressure drops, a violent explosion occurs and the oil flows back up, then they repeat the process. The film oscillates between very tranquil wide shots, that introduce this otherworldliness, close ups that show the violence and the machine-perspective where the viewer becomes part of the violence. Decom 2021 Duration: 14’56” (loop) Format: 4K / 16:9 Colour Credits Concept, direction & production: Tanja Engelberts Camera: Marcel IJzerman, Tanja Engelberts Edit: Rento van Drunen, Tanja Engelberts Colour grading: Marcel IJzerman Sound design: Rento van Drunen, Andreas Kühne Audio mix: Andreas Kühne Special thanks to: All the workers at Sagro Decommissioning Vlissingen Rijksakademie van Beeldende kunsten Gregoriaans Koor Utrecht Photographs: Sander van Wettum

Future maps for hollow places When a platform is removed, nothing remains visible for the bare eye above the water surface: nothing refers to the history of the place. With this work, Engelberts imagined what people would see in the future if they would fly over that seascape, searching for signs of the past. It is filmed with a drone that is searching for something, which contributes to the feeling of trespassing and secrecy. The work combines this film footage with a DIA slide show with names of the platforms, the sounds of the projector gives both rhythm to the film and also references the type of machines used in the beginning of the offshore industry. For the uninitiated viewer, the names on the slides seem regular bird names, but moving through the slides more familiar names like Brent spar reveal the reference of the period in which Shell UK has given platforms the names of birds. With species extinction, are the drones replacing birds in this world? During Rijksakademie OPEN the installation was accompanied by Forgotten seas. A twenty-minute life performance of a sound piece developed with musician and artist Marcel Imthorn. The piece consists out of field recordings Engelberts made during trips on maintenance ships, oilrigs and platforms, together with sounds recordings from the Forties field platforms made in the seventies. It depicts a life cycle on the Northsea, from first encounter till the decommissioning of a platform. For a related series with the same title, prints of a seemingly empty sea were overlaid with a reflective material, once illuminated by a flashlight you can read the platform names. Treasure finder, Barnacle, Indefatigable, Vanguard all names of fields on the North Sea. The reflective surfaces referencing the name signs on platforms, always visible at night. Credits: Title: Future Maps For Hollow Places Format: 4K / 16:9 Colour, sound Duration: 03:43” (loop) Edition: 3 + 2AP DIA slideprojection with text, steel Title: Forgotten Seas Sound performance with Marcel Imthorn Duration: approx. 20 min.