What Knots Knot Knots — Drenthe

Tangential Realms is a non-linear lens-based essay in which Ana Guedes connects points that lie far apart in time and place. Geological samples, natural science collections and moving image come together into a layered portrait of the colonial entanglements of Drenthe.

Guedes follows the traces of displacement held in this landscape: from the transit camp at Westerbork to the arrival of KNIL soldiers and their families. Alongside these histories she brings into view the extraction and depletion of the soil, and the place of Drenthe within wider imperial networks.

In her work, different layers of memory slide over one another. The exhaustion of the earth and that of people, their labour, histories and memory, turn out to be closely bound up with each other. Guedes treats the archive as something living, which keeps resonating in a place and in the people connected to it.