The 30,000 Miles Graveyard

720p (1280x720 px), still based animation, 04'00", 2005 From my blog txt.alexandracrouwers.com: "I had just bought my first laptop when I went for an artist residency at Kunsthuis Syb in Beetsterzwaag, Friesland (NL). The Frysian landscape is flat – much flatter even than the rest of the Netherlands. I was struck by its wide-open views and the indistinguishable transition between land and water at its northernmost coast. Not long before I went to the residency, I made my first animations – even though I did not yet realise I was animating. I wanted images to move, but I did not like the visibility and organisation of live video. I was already working with my digitally manipulated images, and used dissolves between separate layers and images to animate – I mimicked the dissolve-technique of analogue slide projectors. The 30.000 Miles Graveyard was made by dissolving layers of scanned and cut out images and photos of the Frysian landscape and from natural history museums to present a trip through time from the end of the last Ice Age to the extinction of the dodo bird (around 1760). In the center, I stand still until the very end, when my arms slowly start to move to hold a dodo bird – the dodo and I both dissolve into a grey fog. The film is accompanied by a soundtrack by Ottorino Respighi, which adds a melodramatic touch. The title, The 30,000 Miles Graveyard, was inspired by the many dead animals – victims of highway traffic – I encountered each Spring on my drive from Antwerp to my parent’s place a 100 kilometers away. I imagined one long ribbon of highway encircling Earth, and all of its roadkill. I did not check, so the 30,000 miles is a misrememberance of the circumference of Earth – it is in fact almost 25,000 miles (or about 40.000 kilometers). The landscape of the Netherlands has extensively been shaped by Ice Ages, in particular the penultimate one, the Saale Glaciation, during which time the Scandinavian ice sheet covered half of the country. Its glaciers scraped over the land, depositing sand further down their paths – in the Netherlands the ice shaped both the remarkably flat landscape of its Northern parts and the slopes and dunes of its center region. Being a sand box mostly, the surfaces here are relatively malleable, compared to bedrock and mountains. However, the ice also crushed mountain ranges in Norway and Sweden, and transported bits and pieces Southwards – where the stones were used to build dolmen (hunebedden), later on. I had read David Quammen’s The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (published in 1997), of which in particular a passage on the last dodo on Mauritius made a lasting impression. Even though the segment is entirely speculative (vividly describing the lonely bird, her last eggs eaten by rats that traveled to the island with Dutch and Portuguese sailors), to me, it launched the dodo bird as a symbol for human-induced extinction. The bird returns – often subtly – in many subsequent works."