To have and to hold

2012

In the middle of a smal town, an abandoned greenhouse complex was being in decay. Nobody remembered who owned it officially, yet the inhabitants were all owners as their houses were built around the site. Inside the complex, trees and exotic plants had taken up massive proportions: it seemed to be the only unplanned landscape in The Netherlands.

I filmed my explorations of this hidden landscape.

By interviewing locals and doing archaeological research inside, I got to know three main characters: the farmer who once built it to grow flowers, the WW-II pilot who crashed here long before and a homeless man who lived here long after. From their perspectives, I wrote letters from the greenhouse and sent them to surrounding inhabititants.

Shortly after I organised a walk around the greenhouse. As it was unsafe to enter it collectively, we moved slowly around it, using our binoculars to observe the space inside. I invited a local ecologist and historian to learn us more about what we saw. People rediscovered the site and this hidden landscape. One of them told me that this project changed their perception of this site without touching it. This made me aware of the impact artistic research may have as an educational intervention.

The letters, video and documentation of the excursion were exhibited in Mapping the Landscape at Museum Van Bommel Van Dam, who added the project to their collection.