neyde lantyer

PARADISE
[OR 58 SUNSETS]
Live plants, photograhps, texts, objects
Variable dimensions
2024

Installation at New Babylon Exhibition, NDSM Fuse Gallery, Amsterdam 2024.

According to Australian political scientist Sarah Maddison, colonization is “the effect that the other and the other's territory are yours to take and to denounce, because inferior - less efficient, less rational and/or less complete in some sense”. Therefore, it is possible to assume that the desire to posses the landscape and transform it is, ultimately, the desire to subjugate it to something else (more efficient, more rational and complete).

Would a 3 square meter balcony be a possible place to cultivate the lost feeling of being close to nature? And for us, foreigners, would it be enough to fulfill that much-desired tropical sensation? Or perhaps the opportunity to feed the desire to own the landscape and colonize it according to that dream?

Before moving to Amsterdam Noord last year, I used to have a little indoor jungle in my old, dark apartment. I now grow plants on my tiny new balcony as an attempt to chart my own territory in this new neighborhood in progress. My own colonized place among constructions, cranes, excavations of poisoned soil, brand-new buildings, empty spaces, aborted promisses of bridges and parks or comerce (the possibility of an erotic mall) and a constant lost sense of direction. But surrounded by water and plenty of light and sky.

PARADISE (58 SUNSETS)  is an ode to the balcony culture of Amsterdam Noord, made up of bourgeois rosé wine, open parties, sailing boats and the omnipresent soundtrack of the summer festivals almost as much as the constant noise of non-stop building during the weekdays, as an escape from reality and the utopia of a safe place and, ultimately, a safe nature for everyone.

PARADISE (58 SUNSETS) Project, 2023