Blaine Western

The video The Fold of the Land by Blaine Western from 2013 shows a somewhat wild landscape. It is a forest and we don’t get many clues about the location: are we in the Ardennes in Belgium or are we in Brazil? The camera quietly slides through the landscape and we see some of its vegetation. There is not a person in sight. But at some point there are some traces of human existence, albeit in a hushed form. A track leads up to a pile of rocks, and we see a low wall just behind it.

Blaine Western found this desolate museum in the countryside of New Zealand. It is a building that was designed by John Scott, a modernist architect, and it opened in 1974 as the ‘Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre’. Visitors to this small museum could get more information about the indigenous population of the Urewera region in New Zealand. Blaine made this video in 2013 when the museum had been empty for a number of years. Even though the architecture of John Scott has been compared to Frank Lloyd Wright it was no use: the museum was demolished in 2016. This gives the document that Blaine Western created of this building in 2013 an almost prophetic nature: despite a large-scale protest, this museum has not been preserved for the future.