EARTH VISITOR: Gerco de Ruijter

I was contacted by photographer Gerco de Ruijter a few years ago. When he showed me his work I was immediately impressed. He often uses a kite with a camera attached to make photos (kite photography). All beautiful art. This is a nice documentary about how he works:

Gerco De Ruijter from Fotofestival Knokke-Heist on Vimeo.

We became good friends. To my surprise it turned out he has known my music for quite a while.. and he proposed to make an album cover. That was the start of a long collaboration that is still going on. These are some of the covers he made for my albums:

Float

12 inch vinyl EP

Banabila & Mens

Four years ago he asked me to do the sound design for his short film 'Crops'. The response was really amazing ... the film was shown at many film festivals all over the world and we had an installation for 3 months in the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington where I also did a solo performance (electronics / ambient) and a small Q&A:

Crops (Gerco de Ruijter) from Michel Banabila on Vimeo.

CROPS is a stopmotion film on centre pivot irrigation in the USA. Long water-sprinkler arms rotate around a central pivot, irrigating circular fields of verdant crops in desert or semiarid environments. Often a well, located at the centre of the circle, pumps water up from vast aquifers in the rock formations below, or Rio Grande water is canalized and redirected into the deserts feeding the well. Once the Rio Grande reaches Mexico, it's riverbed has dried. This trailer was made using 1000 circles cropped in Google Earth. It is the starting point for a larger project to be released this year. Score by Michel Banabila. 2012 © Gerco de Ruijter.