February 5, 2012
Full Scale Urban Wars Diorama
by fosco lucarelli
Marnehuizen is a Dutch fake and uninhabited city included in the military camp of Marnewaard, near Groningen.
The city provides the army a stage to simulate future urban combats, emergencies and raids, and it consists of a number of streets, some dwellings, a section of railways with a train station, a bank, a supermarket, a warehouse and even a sewers systems. Europe prepares for what is already happening in Athens and what is probably going to happen again in metropolis under siege like London and Paris.
Marnhuizen represents all cities without being one and it appears strickingly similar to the scenario for Lars von Trier’s film Dogville. From the Funambulist‘s review:
“Dogville, a film from Danish director Lars von Trier (2003), is somewhere in between nowhere (utopia) and elsewhere (heterotopia). (…) This space is just like any other spaces in cinema, it exists outside the reality since it is representing this same reality.”
Jeroen Hofman collected his photographs of Marnhuizen in the book “Playground”
This work has been prefaced by Dr. Pieter van Vollenhoven, member of the Dutch Royal House and former military, which personally used to supervise emergencies simulations and was the chairman, until last year, of the Dutch Safety Board.
Via: Il Post
[...] Studio just released an interesting article about the Potemkin village of Marnehuizen in the North of Netherlands, which was built inside the [...]