THE NETHERLANDS VERSIFIED | pim van halem | (multilingual)

recitation

 

holland

pump or drown

reclaim and burn up

fill up and build up

dress and sweat it out

 

visual artist pim van halem reads his bookcase out loud. _the titles of his large collection of books on 'nederland, holland, de lage landen, ons land' serve as lines of poetry. _he lined them up for you

 

 

nederland gedicht

(the netherlands versified)

mp3 audio file

file size: 23,4 mb / dur: 17:03

 

ABOUT THE NETHERLANDS VERSIFIED | pim van halem

my fascination with holland lies in its absurdity. _this country shouldn't exist, but yet it's there. _as soon as we stop preserving it, it starts to disappear

(as a child, i dug a hole in the garden, looking for pieces of roman pottery. _all i found was water. _holland is floating!)

 

once water turned to land - by vegetation: peat. _through drainage of water the land started to sink. _land turned to water by cutting peat for fire. _the water turned to land again by making use of wind force

(windmills against the water wolf)

 

land that was deposited by water (clay), was processed by humans with hands and feet, then transformed with fire (from peat) into bricks to build cities and to pave roads

(where we once built upon cowhides, we now build on top of up to twenty meter long concrete piles that were bashed into the soft soil, down unto the layer of sand, which is also part of our land. _we dig up that old beach from as much as forty meters deep, to fit out a polder for the construction of a residential area. _ what we end up with is a recreation pool for its residents)

 

sea takes land – 'zuiderzee-works' and 'delta-plan' reclaim it

(i once made a walk on the beach of voorne. _at the toe of the dune i saw big lumps of fat clay. _ i asked an employee of the department of waterways, who happened to be measuring the water level there, how the clay got there. _he said: 'that's the island'. _of course! _the dune got blown up the island! _and can you tell me what that is, i asked, pointing at a couple of huge concrete blocks, that emerged from the waves some ten meters seawards. _that's a german bunker, that was built on top of the front dune in the forties.' _wow! _the sea has eaten away 50 meters of voorne in half a century. _do we tolerate that?!)

 

furthermore a country that was the first republic and might end up as the last remaining kingdom. _there's nothing like it. _there must be a way to explain that to anyone. _maybe there's a book about it

 

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