Van Oldenborgh's installation links videos and structures that project an environment in keeping with the content of the film. In Bete & Deise we see two people meeting at the interface between culture and politics: Bete, an actress involved in the 1960s class struggle, and young Deise, who knows little of the issues that were unfolding in the years of the dictatorship in Bazil. The conversation between the two women is enhanced by a third, Lina Bo Bardi, one of the most extraordinary figures in the architectural panorama of Modernism. The structure for the film Bete & Deise is an interpretation of the structures of the Italian architect who moved to Brazil immediately after the war. Her buildings, pervaded with a flavour of achievable utopias, are elegant, sophisticated and practical.

Van Oldeborgh's particular skill lies in producing film in which the image has a physical and environmental dimension – a counterweight that seeks to emphasize the nature of projection, its importance to society and its potential. To van Oldenborgh film is not just moving images, but also a place, a space in which we can not only see something, but also ourselves.

Lorenzo Benedetti
in the catalogue The Moon Has a Complicated Geography
De Vleeshal 26 januari - 14 april 2013



Installation view of The Moon Has a Complicated Geograph, De Vleeshal, Middelburg, 2013. Photographs by Leo van Kampen