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Almost everyone is familiar with Joost Conijn’s film, Vliegtuig (Airplane), produced in 2000, a report on his legendary attempts to fly an airplane he built himself. In the 25 minutes of the film, we see Conijn at junkyards, rummaging together parts for his flying machine, and how he puts it together, ignoring all the technical drawings and instructions of professional airplane builders. The neighbours offer their opinions – ‘I think you need another bolt in the front’ – and a range of tryouts in a soggy field ensue. Because the Netherlands has such strict regulations, Conijn decides to go somewhere where there is less control: the Moroccan desert. We come along on his journey southwards, share in the mechanical breakdowns en route, a whole succession of failed attempts to get the machine off the ground, and the crucial moment in which it is clear that there are so many technical deficiencies with the airplane that giving up seems the only option. But Conijn persists, and in the end, in a heroic final shot, we see the bright orange airplane lift over the horizon against a stark, solid blue sky.Born in Amsterdam in 1971 and raised in Brabant in the south of the Netherlands, Conijn studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Sandberg Institute. Very early in his career, and with such ingenious machines as his airplane, which followed a bicycle that rode backwards and a moped, he was already being compared to artists like Panamarenko and John Körmeling. Conijn has even been mentioned in a single breath with Leonardo da Vinci. An inventor and adventurer with unconventional art projects that appeal to the imagination, Conijn confirms the romantic (and media-genic) image of the artist who claims artistic freedom in the margins of society. Decked out as he is in old-fashioned flying goggles and a leather jacket, it is in Vliegtuig that Conijn most notably plays the role of the artistic free spirit. Nonetheless, Vliegtuig is more than an egocentric documentation of realizing a boyhood dream of adventure. It is an almost mythical narrative about the power to persevere, about overcoming setbacks and pursuing your dreams, despite social conventions and rules.

Documentary Happenings

Regardless of their locations or protagonists, Conijn’s films are characterized by their calm, almost slow pace and documentary style, reminiscent of television programmes by Frans Bromet. A dramatic course of events is spread proportionately across the whole length of the film, without many ups and downs, although the dénouement in Vliegtuig can certainly be referred to as spectacular. The films record a course of events over which Conijn does not have a great deal of control. They are, in fact, a form of documentary happening.Conijn works with an advance plan, but without a detailed script. ‘I think that much of what you see today in art films or documentaries or on TV is contrived. Everything has been determined in advance. I find that totally uninteresting. Things have to continue to be an experiment, or there is no feeling left. You can also just set out and see what comes your way.’ He himself refers to travel without a purpose. ‘You shouldn’t want to invent too much. I do have an image or an idea, but it stays very intuitive. I wanted to fly, so I made an airplane. In the case of Hout Auto (Wood Car), made shortly after Vliegtuig, there were a number of ingredients that gave me the feeling that something was going to happen. I made a car out of wood, which also runs on wood, and went to a place where there is a lot of wood. It just worked. At a given point, I landed – as if it were self-evident – in a region where the entire economy runs on wood.’ Like Vliegtuig, Hout Auto is a kind of road movie that takes us somewhere that was then appearing in the media, rather summarily, and in a one-sided fashion. The audience becomes acquainted with inhabitants of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania. The lack of a common language clearly forms no barrier to contact with the local people. In any case, there is little verbal communication. Most of the communication happens with the hands and feet, a smile, or a welcoming wave of an arm. For the most part, the artist is only marginally present. ‘I didn’t need to do or say very much. The wooden car actually did all the work.’

Encounters

Although Conijn’s films are about inventions and machines, their actual motif is social in nature. ‘At the time I was doing Hout Auto, people had a rather negative picture of Eastern Europe, which in my opinion was primarily based on the superiority of the West. I wanted to see if anything in that image was true. But it also had a romantic side, that yearning for places where time seems to have stood still. In our Western society, everything is so bound by the rules. Modernization has meant that so many things have been lost.’ Conijn’s most recent film, Olland, was commissioned by the Humanist Broadcasting Corporation (HUM). They approached him by asking if he wanted to do a portrait of the Netherlands. Instead of staying in the Netherlands, he travelled to Morocco in the company of two friends. For five weeks, they biked through the Riff Mountains, on ‘normal’ bicycles. ‘What I most wanted to see was the opposite picture, or a least a more complete picture of Moroccans than the image that prevails in the Netherlands, which is rather limited and negative. That image does not mesh at all with the picture I have.’In 50 minutes, Olland sketches the lives of the Moroccans in their own environment. What makes the greatest impression is the hospitality with which the threesome is invited into people’s homes. Even more than in Hout Auto or Vliegtuig, in Olland, meetings and encounters are central and each of them is equally exceptional. People eat and drink together, conversing as best they can, usually about childlike, simple things, such as the exchange of first names and the names of the dishes of food. The heartfelt expressions and the disarming smiles speak volumes. One special encounter is the meeting with Moustafa, an older man who in broken Dutch tells about his time as a guest worker in ‘Olland’. He proudly shows his guests a letter from his former employer, Albert Heijn, and a photograph of a younger Moustafa standing in the snow. A little later, and every bit as proudly, his son shows us his personal water cistern. The scenes at people’s homes are interspersed with shots that do not differ much from the usual video reports of adventure treks: eating by a campfire, sleeping under the sky, repairing bicycle tires, a snapshot with the locals, herds of sheep and goats and scenes of very remarkable landscapes.

Education

In Olland, Conijn’s friends John and Rogier are filmed, but he himself is hardly seen at all. The inventor-adventurer-discoverer in Vliegtuig and Hout Auto is now behind the camera, limiting his own role to observing and recording. In another film, made in 2004, entitled Siddieqa, Firdaus, Abdallah, Moestafa, Hawwa and Dzoel-kifl, the artist had already chosen to keep himself off the screen. He occasionally asks these young protagonists a question, but that is all. In this work, Conijn seeks his own fortune in a journey of discovery.For six months, he follows the dealings and meanderings of seven children who live – as Conijn himself does – as squatters in the former ADM shipyard, just outside Amsterdam. All day long, the children, from three to 14 years in age, experience all kinds of adventures in and around the huge old industrial complex. They play in the mud, set fires, fry an egg, steal sandwiches from a nearby petrol station. It seems like an ideal existence – building huts, eating when you feel like it and no adults telling you what you can and cannot do. The only thing that at first does not seem to make sense are the Islamic names and the blonde locks and blue eyes of the children. In the meantime, the Dutch press has made it known that the story is about seven children living with their father, who is raising them according to Islamic teaching. Child protection services have already paid them a visit, because the father keeps them away from school and it is suspected they are growing up in substandard conditions. What Conijn himself thinks of the situation remains undisclosed. ‘I think it is of no interest at all to provide direct commentary on something. Then you can better go walk around waving a banner. I saw those children, found the way they related to life very special and just filmed it.’ Conijn is irritated by the way the media has put this case in the news. He calls it sensationalist journalism, too quick to pass judgment, often doing so from a very Western and rather bourgeois perspective. ‘For me, Siddieqa, Firdaus, Abdallah, Moestafa, Hawwa and Dzoel-kifl is about a lot of things: about how children are raised, about education, about how children develop, what they do when they are not being directly influenced by the ideas of the people in charge of them.’ In our conversation, Conijn emphasized the fact that he does not want to make explicitly ‘political’ art. ‘Of course I guide the viewer through the selection of my subject matter and the way I create it, but I do not want to attach any moral judgment to it – on the contrary. As an artist, you can make something ‘pro’ or ‘anti’, but I feel that the viewer has to ask himself all that, and needs to think about it. I just put it up for discussion.’ This is not to say that Conijn’s observational and documentary approach is detached or disengaged. ‘As an artist, I seek out a field of tension. How, then, is that field of tension constructed, in terms of social manifestos, social cohesion, rules and regulations, raising children, of danger, of autonomy, of social exclusion? For me, the work is about all those things, but a work of art is no pamphlet. A work of art has to speak for itself.’