Sideway Scenery

The clash between commercial expansion and fear of change, progress and stagnation, positivism and magic is brought to a climax in Anna’s latest scenario. While working on it, a series of installations, photographs, paintings and bronze objects emerged in a wave of inspiration.

The unpredictability of the combinations makes each image and each image ensemble a unique visual reflection. Rock star Lou Reed and novelist AFTh. Van der Heijden contributed to the texts used. In addition to neon, the installations contain authentic heirlooms, animals (road kill) and fragments from the world of the highway.

Sideway Scenery project was prompted by the death of an uncle and aunt with whom the artist often stayed as a child and for whom she acted as executor. When Anna was still a child, the entire area changed radically due to the construction of a highway. Not only was the family plot cut in half: the adjacent farms disappeared forever; a garbage dump was built on the land cultivated by ancestors and the neighbours’ yard was transformed into a brightly lit brothel. During the settlement of the legacy years later, not only the family house but the entire hamlet was completely demolished to clear the way for a large industrial complex.