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Friesland Video (2 min 43 sec.) One of two video works from the Cattle Market project commissioned by artnucleus and first shown on site in the recently closed cattle market in Gloucester, UK Friesian cattle take their name from the Dutch province of Friesland. Their ancestors came from Jutland in Denmark, and spread into the Netherlands to replenish the native stocks, which were periodically devastated by plague and severe flooding from the Zuider Zee. Now, as then, they are bred principally for their high milk yields, that can average 5,500 litres of milk after each calving. |
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| The images in the video concentrate on the distinctive black and white colouring of the Friesian cattle producing an almost abstract field of monotone colour and movement. The sound track is the result of the slowed down ambient sounds captured during filming, and includes the cattle, bird song and crickets. It is as though one where trying to capture the essence of nature through the use of technology. But in the attempt to focus on the detail, through the use of close up and slowed sound and motion, the subject becomes yet more alien to us. The familiar, almost ubiquitous, animals of the English countryside become somehow strange and ethereal. Only in the last few frames of the film does the reality of the subject breakthrough; the eyes, the flies and the yellow tag that indicates that this is still only a unit of economic production. | |
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