Remote Entanglements

Photo 109 on the the Voyager Golden Record (NASA), photo by James P. Blair for the National Geographic Society

‘Remote Entanglements’ is a video installation conceived in response to the Voyager Golden Records. In 1977, the Voyager 1 probe was launched carrying a gold-plated record containing images and music, intended to introduce humanity and Earth to extraterrestrial life. Among the 116 illustrations included on the record, assembled to offer a representative picture of humanity, its environment, and its most remarkable achievements, is the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), which has stood on the grounds of the former deportation camp in Westerbork since 1970. The telescope was chosen on the assumption that its purely functional design would be legible to any extraterrestrial intelligence.

Camp Westerbork was established around 1939 to house Jewish refugees from Germany in the wake of Kristallnacht. Under German occupation, it became a deportation camp for Jews, Sinti, and Roma. After liberation in 1945, it served as an internment camp for Dutch collaborators, and later as housing for Moluccan members of the Dutch East Indies army and their families. In 1970, ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy) chose the site for its telescope array, remote, undisturbed, and uninhabited. Today, a memorial center chronicling this layered history has been built around the telescopes. Westerbork brings together a whole range of worlds and eras: persecution, war, astronomy, and the Dutch colonial past.

The split-screen projection serves as an addendum to that record image, bringing together a reconstructed watchtower and the telescope array. Today, visitors to the camp encounter both the watchtower bearing witness to one of humanity’s most harrowing chapters and the telescopes trained on outer space. Together, their fields of observation span 360 degrees.

… “In 2019 Dijkman invited me to travel with her to Westerbork transit camp, which today serves as a museum, with a radio telescope site next to it. I could not join due to last-minute changes. Dijkman visited the camp with her father, which led to the discovery that her grandfather was a member of the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation and brought to Germany under the Nacht und Nebel decree (‘Night and Fog’) to a proxy camp of Buchenwald, where V-2s and other weapons were produced. The factory complex was operated using a slave labor force of concentration camp prisoners. The prisoners were forced to construct the rockets along an improvised assembly line made of railroad tracks.

Remote Entanglements Part I: Observatories (2020) is the newest work on display in the exhibition. Dijkman returned to Westerbork with her father, to shoot the camp’s watchtower and the radio telescope (set up in the 1970s). She completes the journey that began a decade ago and connects the territorial to the extraterrestrial, the watchtower in charge of the camp’s boundaries to the radio telescopes that cross the atmosphere’s boundaries. Alternatively, the telescope, which was invented for exploring the unknown, actually functions as a watchtower, whose mission is to alert in the event of an invasion from outer space.” – Fragments from Decoding the Colonizer’s Mind by Galit Eilat, 2020