Barbara Visser
Two Mills, One Couple
2001
Two Mills, One Couple is part of Holland in a Day / A Day in Holland, a photo series that Barbara Visser made in the theme-park Huis Ten Bosch in Nagasaki in Japan.
Here we see Jan and Charlotte, two Dutch models who have been transformed into a Japanese couple who are visiting the park and posing before the windmills of Kinderdijk.
With this work, Barbara Visser creates an image of the inhabitants of the global village. In the same way as our cosmopolitan, ahistorical world is magnified in the hyper reality of this reconstructed part of the Netherlands in Japan, Jan and Charlotte strengthen the image of the contemporary citizen who, precisely because of his lack of a clear historical and cultural identity, is better able to go his way. At the same time however, the artist presents a compelling picture of a world in which fiction and reality are no longer distinguishable from one another, and in which all real meaning has largely faded.
