SCARECROWS

We had the pleasure of organizing a masterclass for the Textile and Fashion department of the Royal Academy of Art. Together, the students made twenty scarecrows, that found their way to the vast field of Kamperland, Zeeland.

Clinking coins clatter against a figure and with every gust of wind, the faces rotate on their axis. A giant hand tries to grab the wind. Another creature reflects the sunlight like a disco ball in an abandoned club. CD disks with unknown content, sparkle like they are blinking at you. Twenty scarecrows loom up in the vast field of Kamperland - the wide sparsely populated and flat landscape of rural Zeeland.

09 January 2023–30 March 2023

These inhibitors of the land didn’t appear here just by themselves. They are the creation of 60 students from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. In their daily practice, they all study textile and fashion design, but for the occasion of a one-week masterclass by Das Leben am Haverkamp, they were invited to shift their perspective on everything that they know about Fashion.

When we dress, we are shaping our body to an image of how we want to appear. Fashion is about desire and seduction.The scarecrow, however, wears the discarded clothes of its farmer; clothes that are worn off. Clothes that are no longer ought to perform a social interaction. In their new context of being a scarecrow, they are meant to scare off. Compiled of these rags of its creator, the scarecrow becomes an ambiguous being in between the identity of its creator and a horrific mirror image.

When searching for construction materials, Das Leben am Haverkamp invited the students to sort out the storage space of the department. In this no-man’s land of abandoned prototypes and failed student projects, they found the materials to create their beings. In a one week workshop they magically transformed these materials, and studied its potential when allowing the ruthless elements of nature to play with it. By doing so they animated these discarded materials and created new expressive moving entities.

Crucial for this Masterclass, this was not about developing an individual artistic gesture in solitude, but about collective effort. After a week of constructing the scarecrows within the set boundaries of the academy, it was time to conquer the outdoors together. One by one the scarecrows were positioned in the open field by the groups of students. These alienating creatures now rising from the earth, left at the mercy of unpredictable conditions of the elements. Impermanence is an essential part of their creation and is carefully documented over time, showing the qualities of their very own decay.

We are tremendously proud of the students and their collective efforts to create this bewildering group of experimental ad hoc scarecrows.