With Jim van der Steege
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Milk industries dominate Dutch landscapes. Monocultures of protein-rich grass alone take up nearly a quarter of all land mass. Corn, also produced to feed cows, takes up another five percent. More than a million-and-a-half “dairy” cows (excluding the calves they birth on a yearly basis) live and die under the biopolitical control that this land grab enables. Popular imaginaries of these places tend not to take into account the ecological devastation and mass killing that they presuppose, but instead tie nationalist nostalgia to technological solutionism, a sense of naturalness and an appreciation of farm work as artisanal and laborious.
A field can be a wall is an attempt to disturb these imaginaries by looking closely at milk-industrial landscapes in the northern Netherlands, where the concentration of milk plantations is especially dense. It deploys landscape images, textual fragments, a screen recording of a map and music played on two stereochords to defamiliarize the landscape and interrupt its spectatorial regime.
The film is a collaboration with composer Jim van der Steege, who made vegan instruments for the occasion (conventional string instruments use gelatin-based glue and horse hair). It premiered at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague on April 4th 2025, accompanied by live music played by the Bl!ndman String Quartet. It was also screened at the Politics of Not Eating Animals Conference at the University of Amsterdam in May, at the Animal Liberation Gathering in Appelscha in August and at the Beyond Infrastructure? (Un-)built Environments in the Anthropocene Conference at the University of Vienna in September.