Anotherland | Marcel van der Vlugt

Since the invention of photography, Westerners have left their homeland and traveled to Asia, South America or Africa to find and document paradise. El Dorado, Shangri-La or Atlantis are all mythical inventions to make us dream of distant places. Nowadays, many people try to escape from a stressful life and seek transformation in self-organized colonies and are convinced that they can start a new, purer life away from (Western) civilization.

Marcel van der Vlugt believes that you don't have to travel far to be confronted with uninterrupted natural beauty. 'The most exotic locations are just around the corner' is a phrase he refers to in this project, so he has created his own utopia Anotherland. Van der Vlugt challenges the definition of paradise and tribalism and the authenticity of the photographic documents.
When traveling to remote places, Van der Vlugt was often confronted with the idea that you arrived too late and lived in the wrong decade. Pristine jungles, tribal cultures and nature's virginal innocence have largely been lost, and modern photographs are often constructed to imitate them.

The outcome of Van der Vlugt's research is a new reality in a series of landscapes, portraits and still lifes. All images of Anotherland are performed in Van der Vlugt's house and studio in Amsterdam or in one of the city parks. For this project he uses different locations that might be found near a playground or a questionable parking lot and found structures form the basis of this non-unreal world.

His characters are invented and improvised with everyday objects, residual materials or houseplants, but do not try to imitate a real tribe. A girl next door becomes a pristine beauty from ancient times. A prehistoric man wandering alone in the woods is the photographer himself. He is looking for something we all long for; the purity of beauty.