Corine Alberta (NL) Artist Statement

I preserve what continues to stay with me. The meaning of a project reveals itself during the process.

My practice emerges from sustained observation. Through walking, collecting, listening, and returning again and again to the same place, action, or collection, a form of research slowly develops in which attention is the primary method.

Having grown up on an organic farm in the east of the Netherlands, I came to understand the world through the seasons, the weather, and the rhythm of the landscape. That experience still forms an important foundation for my work. I explore the tension between human time and landscape time: between daily rituals and slow ecological processes, between personal memories and the history held within a place.

My projects are almost always site-specific. It is not the place itself that is central, but the relationship people form with it. Through long-term presence, observation, and placing different forms of knowledge alongside one another, I explore how a landscape, building, or community acquires meaning.

Within my practice, archiving is not a way of bringing something to a close, but a form of thinking. Daily aerial photographs, weather observations, handwritten paper traces, maps, sounds, walks, and found objects function as active archives in which new connections become visible.

I work across disciplines with photography, installation, sound, drawing, text, and archival material. The medium always follows the research; the final form emerges from the specific qualities of a place, a collection, or a material.

My work invites a renewed way of looking at what may seem self-evident, and explores how attention, time, and repetition can deepen our relationship with a place.

The card from Besthmenerberg is part of a very big collection of postcards I have collected over the years. They are part of a long term project called 'Don't mention the war'. A project about the history of Besthmenerberg in the Netherlands, near where I lived: During the early 20's the Starcamps of Krishnamurti where located there, during WOII the Germans occupied it and it became a concentration camp. After the war, until the present day, it is a holiday park.. people from all over the world having a good time, having now what happend on that same day in the past.

The other card is a collage, made by me. When I travel I collect memories.. traces.. Something to hold on to. But the moment it self paste away.. Through compositions, I seek a form and a place to document these memories.