Saramacca en gymnastiek 1925 - 1935

This diptych of untitled photographs was made by an anonymous artist. Each image exists in its own separate reality, but here they are on the same page. The top image is a dense mass of trees, a path, and what looks like a dugout canoe – it is raw and uncultivated. The bottom image, however, is ordered, a field occupied by two rows of figures standing in formation for gymnastic exercise. There’s a visual rhyme between the trees in the first picture and the figures in the second. The light across the field is flat and diffuse and this makes the figures appear two-dimensional, like silhouettes or musical notes on a staff. There’s an interesting contrast between the two images, between nature and culture, between chaos and order. Which of these places is the real place? Which is the dream? I think of Robert Smithson's earthworks in dialogue with Sol LeWitt’s structures. Art is an ongoing conversation across time. There are no fixed meanings here.