Area +31

2018

video essay
single channel
16:9, color, sound, 5’30’’

voiceover by Luisa Traumann
music editing by Anton Maiof
“The Ex-Priest” by Ketsueki Sākuru (Giallo Disco Records)

“Area +31” is a visual essay created with archive material present in the Nederlands Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid in Hilversum (NL), as part of the Open Set Lab.
The artwork emulates the dynamics of amateur conspiracy theory videos reproducing their typical visual and audio grammar. It speculates on the shift in Holland’s population average height in the last two centuries and aims to convince the viewer that this change is highly conspicuous, anything but normal. We all have biases that subconsciously lead us: our brain is built to look for suspicious stuff, we don't like to think that ambiguous events are just random or driven by pure chance. Maybe we are right, though. Why are Dutch people so tall?