The landscape in the Netherlands is something that became theme of interest for me since I moved here. How come it is so flat? How is that even possible? Lands in the whole country have gone – and still go – under a heavy process of change to fit the dutch purposes for transportation, urbanisation, agriculture and so on.
The field studied for this project is a flower polder on Noordwijkerhout. As the rest of Holland, the landscape is pretty flat – execpt for a hill on the horizon. For a foreigner as me, it was delightful to finally see a change of terrain height.
What I imagined first...
...and how is really was.
A bunch of piled trash.
What I ignored at the time was that the hill was actually a former landfill – it started around 20 years ago, when a paint factory in the region caught fire and the remains were to be deposited somewhere. The site chosen became a deposit of non-chemical trash for the whole neighborhood; mostly stone and wood were thrown there.
Today, the hill is owned by a golf club.
I was very curious to know how other people felt about the hill and its history. Through interviews, I was able to generate collages based on people's feelings and my own interpretations of the environment.
The recently-moved family doesn’t dislike anything on the place. They love the flowers and are really enjoying the fact they moved from the city to the countryside. However, the little kid hoped that the green grass he saw from far on the hill was an amusement park. The golf club was discovered as a deception, as none of them play it.
The well-succeeded farmer has a family name that is famous all over the Netherlands for the flower production. He dislikes abandoned greenhouses the other plot owners leave behind – there is a reason for that: once they are removed, people loose the right to build anything else on the site. On the other hand, he appreciates the small scale agriculture proportioned by the small scale plot division. The hill looks nice, though he didn’t enjoy it at first sight. He still remembers it as “the place everybody put their trash after the paint-factory fire”.
The elderly couple runs a garden shop nearby the hill. They said there were plans for a sightseeing point on top of the landfill – with its 23m, it is the highest point in South-Holland. That was more or less back when the golf club owner was trying to get the papers so that he could build a golf court there.
They liked the place better when it was used for cattle – then it was beautiful all-year long, not only during the flower season.
Their pain in the neck are the skeleton greenhouses and the neighboring factory with delusions of grandeur, that are always trying to get more and more land to them – and are too noisy.
I would like to thank Krijn Christiaansen and Cathelijne Montens, the professors that helped me though this process, and my colleagues and friends, Yuri and Thiago, that made the Wednesdays at the polder a much funnier place to be.
Disclaimer: "Peter" was the name suggested by one of my colleagues for the hill/landfill/mountain/thing/trash place, as I was finding it very hard to find a proper name for it. Thanks!
