Inzicht/Uitzicht (2025)

In 2025, Tijs Rooijakkers and I designed the travelling installation Inzicht/Uitzicht, commissioned by de Zuiderwaterlinie. The work was part of Menno's Reis II, an art and research journey along the Zuiderwaterlinie, inspired by the inspection tours of fortress builder Menno van Coehoorn.

The installation

The installation is a physical meeting place. Its needles shift between different postures. Inzicht, insight, looks back and remembers. Uitzicht, outlook, turns toward imagination and the road ahead: which futures do we long for, and which do we want to avoid? Standing around the installation, participants look at the landscape through the ring of needles and are invited to share their insight or outlook by speaking it out into the landscape.

The installation traveled along the water defense line. At five locations, we organized a Linie Challenge. Each gathering was built around a different workshop exploring a local, current question: dyke reinforcement, agricultural transition, water safety, the future identity of the landscape. Working with local residents, we gathered insights from the past and outlooks on possible futures.

Listen to a sample of what has been collected:

I was the co-designer for the installation and responsible for the concept, design and execution of the Linie Challenges. That involved the following:

• Designing and hosting interdisciplinary workshops.
• Research into landscape, history and local context.
• Storytelling that combined historical analysis with myth and imagination.
• Sound design as a form of (imaginary) time travel.
• Bringing together makers from many different disciplines, from basket weavers to chefs.

Every Linie Challenge was site-specific, shaped by the current frictions of the place it happened in. If you are curious about one of these events, or interested in developing a similar activation for your municipality, organisation, site, school or cultural context, I would love to hear from you.

The first gathering, and the reveal of the installation. Together we carried one of its needles to a place of transition: ground between an old dyke and a new one, land that is about to be changed again as the dykes need to be raised once again. Through a sound journey we traveled through the deep history of this place and met the waterwolf that once haunted it, and seems to have returned. We asked ourselves: how can we shift our relationship with the water from domination to co-existence?

As we traveled to different possible futures a century from now, we asked ourselves: what do we want our relationship with this soil to look like? What is the future of farming?

For answers, we turned to older technologies. Guided by basket weaver Anita van Kraaij, participants wove small baskets from willow. Inside went local seeds from De Brabantse Walnoot and written words of the participants. Each basket became a gift to the soil, buried in the landscape to initiate a conversation.

We gathered around a long table inside an old fort, where ten thousand years of history became stories, soundscapes and a spectacular lunch. In this collaboration with chef Michka Chel of Kookstudio Hoeksche Waard, guests ate their way through time. Each era arrived as a course, supported by a soundscape and a story, from the first hunter-gatherers to the settlements that followed, to the monocultures most of us eat from now.

Halfway through, we left the Dutch frame of reference to explore a story from a culture with a radically different approach to nurturing its food. Then, returning to the Netherlands, we closed with a locally grown taste of what the future of this ground might hold if we dare to dream with the landscape.

We met at the Maasmonument in Vlijmen, an artwork that renders the whole river Meuse, source to sea, at roughly a ten-thousandth of its size. We followed its path and stopped at multiple points along the water, from a spring narrow enough to step over to the delta where the river finally spreads and dissolves into the land. At each stop the Meuse spoke. It told of its ancient power, of the centuries humans spent taming and straightening it, and of the recent stretches where it has been given room to move again.

The final gathering, on ground whose beloved landscape had recently been altered to raise the dykes. A sense of climate grief lingers, which made it the right place to explore the question this whole series had been circling: how do we live with a landscape that is changing?

We ended by returning to the beginning, revisiting the story of the waterwolf, the old figure we blamed for destruction that was in part caused by our own exploitation of the land. In an attempt to listen to the landscape again, we shared stories of gratitude and of grief for this place, and then wove a web that revealed the interdependence of all its inhabitants, human and non-human.