Documentary filmmaker Jos de Putter is best known for It’s Been a Lovely Day (1993), the film in which he documented his parents’ last active year on their farm in Zeelandic Flanders. Since then he has made several installations around the themes of roots and departure. These are now being shown together for the first time in the Zeeuws Museum. 

Landscapes

The exhibition centres on Landscapes (2017), a new series of six video portraits of farmers and agricultural workers who have spent their whole lives working on the land. Their gaze conceals that which cannot be put into words. It is the repository of a life with and of the soil.

The installation Zeeland’s Clay (2013) in the collection of the Zeeuws Museum is a video triptych comprising footage of a 2 x 2 metre section of a potato field recorded over a period of a year. A fascinating, contemplative spectacle of nature with an unsuspecting passing pheasant as the highlight.

In Passers-by (2005) De Putter depicted empty bus shelters in the desolate landscape of Zeelandic Flanders, edited together with fragments of ‘found sound’ and ‘windblown conversations’.

Jos de Putter

Jos de Putter (1959) has made ten feature-length documentaries that have garnered international prizes and dozens of documentaries for television. From 2007 to 2013, he was commissioning editor of VPRO Tegenlicht. He currently dispatches video correspondents all around the world to make web documentaries for the online platform De Correspondent.