The Speaking Land 

'The Land still speaks to us and The Speaking Land will helps us understand its language'. *01 

I am a visual artist based in Kampen/Overijssel, The Netherlands. I work in a variety of media, from walks to video to performances; I use my body awareness/senses to experience the natural and urban places in my surroundings. My art-works have often a social critical layer that is performed in a poetic way. Through my work I want to contribute to a reexamination of the relationship between the human- and the non-human world. I studied Fine Arts at Minerva Academy Groningen, The PhotoAcademy Amsterdam & The Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

Before my study at the art-academy I made a painting with the title: 'The Speaking Land'. This work suggested the soil of the Uluru (rock) Area in Central-Australia and was made of thick paint in the colors red and brown. Although I have never been to Australia; I felt a very strong connection to the Uluru Area and the Indigenous Knowledge. The traditional owners are the Anangu people; one of the oldest human societies in the world. The Title'The Speaking Land' refers for me to the language of a specific natural or urban place through stories, memories, growing plants, wind-whispers, the soil, founded materials, stones and sounds. 

At the back-cover of the book 'The Speaking Land: Myth and Story in Aboriginal Australia' by Ronald M. Berndt and Catherine H. Berndt is written:'The Land still speaks to us and The Speaking Land will helps us understand its language'. This phrase is the underlaying content of my art-works. *01 

I capture the language and the relation with the places through installations, walks, drawings, performances, videos, thoughts, poems, field-recordings, texts, maps and photo's.

As a part of my work I quote phrases of poets, philosophers, indigenous people and writers in the fields of spiritual ecology, philosophy, geography, architecture, anthropology, science and the knowledge of traditional wisdom.

~Annemarie Cilon~

'Spiritual ecology is a recognition of the need to return to the source of our own sacred nature, and of the spiritual practices that affect both the individual and the whole, practices that can through our own individual awareness and action, also help restore the connection between the Earth and its own source'.  Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee