Artists bring paradoxes of Soesterberg Air Base to light at Festival #DeBasis

Art at Soesterberg airbase is almost by definition a paradox. So is the natural site that was a military base. And that is why visual art finds a perfect home here. For festival De Basis, artists from five countries were asked to enter into a dialogue with this absurd, until recently forbidden terrain. This results in beautiful contrasts.

First, in the underground alloy. This bare, chilly hideout could once shelter some 80 soldiers, should a nuclear attack ever occur. You enter a few corridors underground. Cupboards with all numbered compartments provide space for your belongings. After a few more corridors, you enter the shelter. The French artist Laurence Aëgerter has turned this atomic basement into something humane. She always looks for human aspects in her work. As for the airbase, she found them in a photo album from the 1960s, where she found pictures of partying, flirting, dancing and toasting soldiers surrounded by women. Aëgerter took off the cloths of the original bunker beds and she covered them with new canvas, on which the party photos are projected. Occasionally the lights go out. Then you only see people's faces, which are woven from fluorescent thread. For a few seconds, you see only human beings and forget the threat of war.

Just as Aëgerter gives the airbase a human face, the Turkish filmmaker lets Ali Kazma see the beauty of the airbase. And he too sees many contrasts in it. In a shelter, once the 'parking garage' of an F16, two videos run simultaneously, with eelden he shot at the airbase. You see tubes, equipment, trees, a coat rack, a dead rat, runways, bunkers, spiders, aircraft, birds flying out, weeds in the tarmac, instructions, propellers, wires. And you can hear the sound of birds, appliances, planes or the wind in the trees. Especially when the image of the left projector differs from the right one, it impresses. Kazma has an eye for detail, turning something small into something big and vice versa. That makes you silent.

Of quite a different order is the interactive presentation by the young artists Marije de Wit and Hugo van Dun in bunker 77. In this bunker, on a remote site that was recently totally secret and forbidden territory, they let you play war. Where cruise missiles once lay, you are now given blocks of wood and allowed to use them to build a house for a model village. The nicer the houses, the more the people earn and the more money the village has. So: the more weapons they can buy to bomb the enemy village on the other side of the wall. They make you relive the Cold War and feel the threat. That threat hangs over the two villages in the form of a bag of sand. As soon as a sack falls, it is war.

In the bunker next door, seven artists make you totally forget that this was an ammunition depot. As fresco painters, they set to work here. Nothing reminds you of gunfire; artist Erik Odijk returns the bunker to nature. Flowers, plants, strings of branches, seeds - everything overgrows the ceiling. The artist - like Michelangelo once did in the Sistine Chapel - could not do the job without six ''assistants'' and has turned it into a Gesamtkunstwerk. And does it look like it, or is there a hand drawn in the middle of the ceiling too? Like the hand of God reaching for Adam's hand in the Sistine Chapel, this hand touches nature. It calls war to a halt and returns the air base to nature. And by this to art too. A beautiful divine sign. It would be a wonderful new destination for the airbase. Because artists know what to do with this place.