Land of Desire: Happy is the New Black

Donna Verheijden graduated from the Design Department of the Sandberg Institute in 2013. Verheijden’s work examines the power structure of images used in advertising and also pop and visual culture. In her film, Land of Desire, she questions our increasingly consumerist society and the desire-driven media landscape.

By tracking our desires using metadata retrieved from apps, social media, and websites, marketers create behavioural profiles that arguably reveal more about us than our DNA. To what extent are our desires affected by what others want us to long for? Verheijden’s film strives to explain how images seduce, and sometimes even manipulate our perception of reality, and thus reveals the thin line between our needs and desires.

Studio 31

Verheijden’s second film, Studio 31, documents a quest to recreate the enharmonic super organ designed by Renaissance music theorist, composer, and innovator Nicola Vicentino (Italy, 1511 – 1576). Vicentino was one of the most visionary musicians of his era, inventing, among other instruments, the microtonal keyboard with 36 or 31 keys per octave. Unfortunately, all of his instruments have vanished. The only remaining visual reference of this ingenious instrument is depicted on a sixteenth-century medallion. In the film, Verheijden visits key figures who share their knowledge of the specialised and disappearing profession of organ building.