Armando - The Guilty Landscape
From 16 October 2026
A landscape can look peaceful. But what if you knew what had once happened there? In *Armando – The Guilty Landscape*, you’ll discover how the woods around Amersfoort formed the basis of Armando’s (1929–2018) work.
A landscape can look peaceful. But what if you knew what had once happened there? In Armando – The Guilty Landscape, you’ll discover how the woods around Amersfoort formed the basis of Armando’s (1929–2018) work.
Armando grew up in Amersfoort, close to the site that became Amersfoort Concentration Camp during the German occupation. As a boy, he used to play in the surrounding woods. What he saw and heard there stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Later, he put into words something that continued to preoccupy him: how can a place where terrible things have happened look so ordinary – and even beautiful – afterwards? He called this ‘the guilty landscape’.
A landscape that remains silent
Trees continue to grow, flowers bloom again and birds keep singing. Nature reveals almost nothing of what has taken place in a place. It was precisely this that Armando found disturbing. The visible traces disappear, but the past is not gone with them.
Forests, trees, fields and horizons therefore often recur in his work. Sometimes dark and menacing, sometimes light and serene.
See with different eyes
Armando’s work appears to be about the Second World War, but he was never concerned with that one war alone. He was concerned with the pattern behind it: that history repeats itself with every war. Bigger questions about good and evil, guilt and innocence, perpetrator and victim, remembering and forgetting.
In Armando – The Guilty Landscape, you’ll discover how these themes come together in his art and how deeply his work is connected to Amersfoort.
Author: Annebeth Felet
