Struggle Part III: Marin Leus

“Versus” is an organization consisting of Dutch photography students (the Royal Academy of Arts in the Hague), creating a parallel group exhibition with CAFA (the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing) about various subjects concerning the theme: ‘struggle’. Versus is neither a plead for pessimism nor of a cynical nature but rather a celebration of opposites in the grand scheme of life. Versus’ aim is to address some of these experiences, by means of visual transcript.

In order to understand and to some extend partake in the process leading to this visual presentation, Versus reports about their process in a weekly column, which will indirectly function as a forum on their weblog: www.expoversus.tumblr.com

Each column features a different student and an aspect of his or her motivation, progress and personal working method. This week’s column is inspired by the process and research of Marin Leus (www.marinanke.com), and the result of prepared interviews and insight lead by fellow photography student Timothy Zwitser.

There is an island of plastic, the size of South America, floating around somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. Many people don’t know of this phenomenon, but the available stock images show this cruel beauty of pollution and how it manifests itself. Within the grace of such hidden catastrophes lies the danger of overseeing the real problem behind it. This is the main inspiration for Marin’s work.

Marin Leus is in love with nature, she’s a vegan and somewhat of an idealist. All the ingredients of a naive modern day tree hugging hippie girl living in a shed with a variety of farm animals (preferably two of each, so they can procreate). Trust me; the opposite is true. I feel that this is how we tend to respond to people like Marin. We try to disregard those who possess strong moral values concerning nature and well-being to validate our own neglect when it comes to sustaining our natural habitat. “It’s easy to produce and consume products without noticing the bigger picture. We buy a bottle of water and generally we dispose of the packaging. Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand the oversight, but we don’t think about the unnecessary waste that we produce and where it ends up at after we dispose of it.” Marin wants to create an awareness of individual waste production in our households by showing the quantity of plastic packaging being wasted. She hopes that by doing this in a subtle manner, people will be inclined to look at these normalities through her eyes and might just be willing to adjust their behavior. 

At the very start of her project she tried living without producing garbage for as long as she could. Then she decided to collect her own garbage over a period of a week, but realized that personalising her waste production wouldn’t bring across the right message. After a while she tried so many ways to translate her subject matter, that she got lost in the magnitude of ideas and concepts. Something that isn’t unusual in the initial phase of photographic research. "In every case I was dealing with mass quantities of waste in the daily lives of people, and after collecting feedback, from a multitude of trained and untrained eyes, I realized that I should focus on plastic waste in particular, because it’s not an easily digestible material and more durable then a chewed on paper coffee cup for instance.’’Eventually the message has to be at least almost indisputable, so that any disregard or doubt of personal motives by the viewer is second to none. As illustrated earlier; the most important steps in the process of Marin’s work and research are the result of critical and constructive conversations. "Actually this interview is very helpful.’’ The last few weeks have been full of discoveries and revelations for Marin. She now knows where she is headed and how to translate her ideals into an environmental friendly photographic product. A project that speaks to a wide variety of viewers when the exhibition opens (January 13th).]

Written by Timothy Zwitser

www.expoversus.tumblr.com 
www.marinanke.com

 

Also read previous columns about the Versus photographers. Part I focusses on Christy Beaujon’s work and  Part II on Shalita Dietrich’s photographs.