August 2075: our daughter, Joséphine, will be 50 years old. Right now, she is just 13 days old. How can you begin to imagine a life that has only just begun? What will she be doing in 50 years? Will she be a lorry driver or a professor of ancient history? Will she perform in packed stadiums or sell oranges at the market? And will I, at 80, still be there to witness it?

August 2075: silence in the university library. Students work with the utmost dedication on a task no greater than one of the many sunbeams setting the city ablaze. The heat is relentless. The study hall is packed, and everywhere there is a passionate silence. All these students, rising up again and again, for 500 years now, working on something far too small and far too vast at once. A centuries-long project, unfolding in silence, ever hotter, ever higher. It is August, and expectations are soaring higher than ever before.

Inspired by Ligeti’s Fifth Piano Etude. The first moving image Joséphine ever followed with her eyes (https://edu.nl/vb863 - 10:29). 

1 - Arc-en-ciel
Leiden is an island in a network of cities; the sea has reclaimed much of the polder. August brings a heatwave: every day and night is oppressively hot. The rainbow becomes a symbol of stifling, dense, humid heat –breathing is never steady. Meanwhile, the information revolution of the 2020s has only intensified: everything happens at once, everything arrives at once. Humans adapt, let it wash over them – as if each day is born anew.

2 - Humans in revolt
Absurd: students in the university library. With full devotion and the highest expectations, they carry a single grain of sand up the dune – in absolute silence – and place it, with the last of their strength, on the sweaty heap of faded signatures. They are rebellious, passionate, yet fleeting and insignificant. Like all actions, theirs are aimed at survival – just like all those who came before them.

3 - August
Those tireless students who keep going. Who push through the heat, who are the lightness of the August sun, who bring beauty into the world. Those students who continue to find each other in shady parks, who fall in love in the depths of the night, who stay together (often not), and who together shape the next 50 years. A (new?) human life.

'August slipped away into a moment in time 'cause it was never mine'