///WAAR IS DE ZEE NOU

Printing roller

Since the Braakman was an open estuary until 1952, the generation of my grandfather consciously experienced this water. A barrier between west and east Zeeland Flanders, but an opening to the sea for fishermen from Philippine and Boekhoute (B).
Imagining a scene of a grandfather looking at the new situation with his granddaughter, a sentence that a little girl could say came to mind. Where is the sea now? For the project Geboortegrond (Birthplace) curated by Carien Poissonnier I built an idea around this sentence. I wanted it to wander, travel, to appear and disappear. The centrepiece was a huge printing roller. It needed two people to push around. It was pushed through the woodland to a sandpath accompanied by the fanfare of Boekhoute in Belgium. Only after it rolled over the sandpath you could read the sentence ‘Where is the sea now’.

Print in sand

On the building of Staatsbosbeheer (state forestry), a farmhouse that was the starting point for this project with an exhibition inside, five wooden signs were mounted. Like the printing roller they had letters mirrored on them. When you leaned against a sign for a minute it left a temporary tattoo on your body.

As a third part I made a series of postcards. From the cinema news, called Polygoonjournaal, I made stills of the closure of the estuary. I only choose stills where people were looking at the works, seen on the back.