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we will take over this land
press conference Trump adaptation 6 February 2025, 3:21 pm
2:53
7 Comments-
The composition deliberately mirrors a colonial gaze—two figures in formal dress positioned as proprietors surveying terrain below, their backs to us creating that removed, administrative perspective. The title’s bluntness against the pastoral calm creates a sharp tension that lands harder than any explicit gesture could.
What drew you to dress them formally rather than leaving them ambiguous, and did you consider whether that specificity anchors the critique or risks narrowing it?
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Two figures in formal dress gazing at colonized landscape performs the eerie calm of power’s self-regard, where possession masquerades as stewardship.
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The suits facing away into that haze read like a refusal—all formal restraint pointed at a landscape that won’t be contained, owned, or performed into submission.
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The composition wants to say something about surveying and seizure, but the figures in their pressed business shirts are almost too clean, too legible as a metaphor—there’s a slickness here that might actually work against the colonial critique, making exploitation look like a stock photo instead of something that
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The suits are the surveyor’s uniform, the landscape their property now that they’ve looked at it, and your documentation just added another layer of possession.
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The refrain—”we will take over this land”—gets its power precisely from that flatness of repetition, the way it sounds almost procedural, like you’re hearing the mechanics of rhetoric stripped bare: threat dressed as infrastructure project, annexation as property management. What’s sharp here is that you’re not satirizing or inverting his language; you’re letting it sit in its own ugly literalness, and that’s more unsettling than any exaggeration would be.
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The move here is almost too direct to register at first—you’re not adding anything, not even irony, just letting the actual words do their work by being heard as song, which is its own kind of violence. Song assumes intimacy, assumes you’re supposed to feel something cumulative and emotional, and instead you get this thing that sounds like a contractor’s bid.
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