“The future is green.” While performance artist Noa-Marthe Prins speaks her text, slowly and emphatically, she smears her face with green paint. “I dream of clean and I scream for green,” she says. The world is currently having a hard time with this warming, but when everything and everyone is green, it will be fun again. Spectators in the front row also get a smear of paint on their cheeks – the energy transition affects everyone.
The major energy companies sell the promised land behind that transition as a clean and green paradise, where it will soon always be spring, Prins wants to say. But in her performance GAS/LIGHT she shows how gas and oil capital manipulates the world with sweet talk. Back then, after the discovery of the Groningen gas bubble in 1959, and now, almost 65 years later, it still does.
Animal skin and straw skirt
On a horse pasture near Steendam, Prins climbs and rolls in the blazing sun on four oil barrels, dressed in an animal skin and a straw skirt. She grunts, moans and writhes – lots of body and sweat. The impressive decor consists of the pipes and conduits spaghetti from the Siddeburen gas extraction site, which was closed three years ago. On October 1, the last of these installations in the region around Slochteren will also close – installations that gave the country warmth and prosperity, and the people of Groningen torn and suffered.
The performance GAS/LIGHT is part of the Green Fields/Subsurface manifestation, which can be seen and experienced this month on the ‘Cultural Island’ on the Damsterplas, an artistic stopping place next to a sand quarry.
The traveling art caravan Het Resort from Groningen invited, in addition to Noa-Marthe Prins, also the Amsterdam writer and artist Artun Alaska Arasli to camp for a month next to a gas tap that was to be dismantled, where art had to emerge instead of gas.
Singing bowl sounds
On a very hot Sunday we drive from the station in Groningen into the province on a refrigerated double-decker bus – a spaceship with artistic aliens through the Groningen country.
Most passengers are friends and acquaintances of The Resort, the main language on board is English. From the speakers comes the soundscape that the Amsterdam composer Phantom Wizard (Isha Forster) created for the occasion: repetitive singing bowl sounds that seem to bubble up from the landscape itself.
At the opening Forster plays live on turntable and clarinet. The performance is just a few minutes in when the power goes out, as if to illustrate that energy cannot be taken for granted.
The common thread in Green Fields/Subsurface is, indeed, the green pasture and what lies beneath it, or is swept beneath it. Green is also the grass carpet in the caravan in which Alec Mateo shows his audiovisual work. A screen shows images of a lovely Teletubby landscape, torn apart by images and music by Ede Staal, who gave a voice to the blues of Groningen. In between, seemingly randomly struck piano keys sound. Mateo had a computer program transform indifferent earthquake figures into music, indifferent music that grates with Staal’s deeply human voice.
Also read: Money has always been dominant in decision-making about gas extraction
After a walk through a flower country buzzing with insects, you arrive at the container where Artun Alaska Arasli wrote his essay Notes on Entropy hung up. The impressionistic and associative text takes a bird’s-eye view of a world of topics: gas extraction, the land art of Robert Smithson, the murder of Sharon Tate by Charles Manson’s cult. A text to read again in peace, in a place where it is not thirty degrees and there is no free cava, like here.
At the end of Noa-Marthe Prins’s performance, she wrapped the oil drums with turf. Something like that will happen here too. The residents have been promised a clean green lawn once everything has been cleared away. Then you won’t see anything anymore of what happened here. The gas extraction system remains underground, up to three kilometers deep.
Green Fields/Subsurface is open at weekends at Kultuureiland in Steendam. On the final day, October 7, Noa-Marthe Prins will perform her performance again and there will be an artist talk.