The Living Mountain by Awoiska Van der Molen

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Music and mountains meet in Awoiska Van Der Molen’s new collaborative photobook

For her third and latest photobook, Awoiska van der Molen travels deep into nature in search of an intrinsic, unspoken and lost world. Removing herself from the technologies of modern life, her project The Living Mountain attempts to capture unspoiled landscapes before any mark is left by human intervention. “Regardless of how personal the starting point of my work may be, in the end I hope my images touch the strings of a universal knowledge, something lodged in our bodies, our guts, an intuition that reminds us of where we came from ages ago,” says Van der Molen. “A memory of our core existence, our bedrock, unyielding certainty in a very precarious world.”

© Awoiska Van der Molen.
© Awoiska Van der Molen.

Inspired by the Nan Shepherd book of poems of the same title, The Living Mountain is a collaboration between Van der Molen and Thomas Larcher, composer-in-residence at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam. Some of the landscapes presented within the book are from Larcher’s native home in the Tyrol region of Austria. Music scores composed by Larcher in response to the images are reproduced within the book, creating a conversation between the outsider and the insider, human and nature, image and sound.

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Isaac Huxtable

Isaac Huxtable is a freelance writer, as well as a curator at the arts consultancy Artiq. Prior to this, He studied a BA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute, followed by roles at British Journal of Photography and The Photographers' Gallery. His words have featured in British Journal of Photography, Elephant Magazine, Galerie Peter Sellim, The Photographers' Gallery, and The South London Gallery. He is particularly interested in documentary ethics, race, gender, class, and the body.