Smells and sounds can evoke a world, even if that world is no longer there or has almost disappeared. Actor Huub Stapel smells his youth in a reconstructed grutters shop in the Zeeland village of Groede. He inhales the smell of his parents’ candy store, an aroma of Brasso copper polish, Aunt Blank’s stove cloths, mixed with sweets and goodies.
Huub Stapel and Wim Daniëls are looking for in the series The village the places outside the city where a third of the Dutch population lives, and on Sunday evening part four was about endangered villages. At risk due to aging and depopulation, vacancy and impoverishment. Or because of the gluttony of the neighboring city that is building closer and closer, until the village is hardly more than a train station surrounded by a few remnants of houses. See Sloterdijk, once a village on the dike, but now a stop in a fully built Amsterdam business center.
Groede agricultural village threatened to run out in the sixties. Conservative survivors bought up the buildings “for an apple and an egg,” and restored them to their original condition. In this way the village center was preserved, so picturesque that “people from outside” liked to stay there. Tourists then bought their own houses and rented them out to new people from outside. Stapel and Daniëls ring the doorbell of the last permanent residents in a beautiful street. Lady and master of the house in the doorway. All the other houses, she says, were bought by… “What are those things called?” Germans, help Stapel. She means Airbnb. Gone is the social cohesion in their street, their village, their piece of the world.
amphibious people
Stef Biemans lets himself be in his series Between the Americas guided by sounds. The sea that rustles, the grater over the coconut, the stitching needle of the sewing machine. And on top of that, I’ll just say, the viewer gets to hear that typical, nasal voice of his.
He lived in Nicaragua for fifteen years, at home in the area that is wedged “like an umbilical cord” between the Americas. And you notice that in everything. To where he takes us: the San Blas archipelago off the coast of Panama, 357 mini-islands where the Kuna live. Not long ago, the island population still lived on the mainland, until they were chased out by the Spaniards with their “weapons, diseases and Bibles.” That’s how Biemans puts it, and the old Kuna man immediately feels understood by him.
On Fadahua (literally: small island) he listens to a Kuna woman who ritually whips the waves with reed stalks. She, “daughter of the sea,” asks the wind to die and the sea to stop rising. The sea around the islands has risen to such an extent that the water flows into the houses. Slowly, the Kuna seem to be turning into an amphibious people. To anticipate the final flood, the government of Panama is already building houses on the mainland for 300 islanders. Plastic walls filled with cement, we hear hammers hitting the last nails in what will soon be safe havens.
What Biemans shows and hears is poetically beautiful and intensely disturbing. The man who cries at the sound of a ‘lonely tree’, the cheerful, progressive conversations he has with two women in traditional costume and one gay who is rocking a toddler to sleep. There is a man who softly sings his happiness, contrasted with the jolly booing of tourists on their piece of earth, the ‘tourist island’.
Do not come and tell the Kuna that the sea will swallow them up. They will sink, it is the punishment of the sea and they know why the world deserves it. People are cutting down trees, building factories, and flooding nature. “The bottom of the ocean is dense.” says the old Kuna man. “There is no drain.” So they wait for the water to come.