NEWSLETTER

© krijn giezen

This project started as a proposal for a competition to commemorate the completion of the reinforcement of a new dike built along the sea in the Province of Friesland. This ambitious infrastructure project was the result of the dramatic floods of 1953 in which more than 1800 persons perished, and which had caused major land damages.
The committee probably imagined that an artist would propose an object-like monument, so Krijn Giezen’s proposal was unexpected and shocking. The artist’s logical and coherent concept targeted the site itself and the current situation there. At the time there was a heated debate on what to do about new lands recently reclaimed from the sea. One side wanted to turn these into protected natural spaces, while the other wanted to turn them into agricultural lands, as the law allowed.
Krijn Giezen’s clever project, combining and contrasting both the natural landscape and the cultivated one, brought both sides together. The artist designated a 400 m x 400 m. zone on each side of an existing straight walk towards the sea. The western side to be dedicated to the reclaimed the land and its conversion into an agricultural area, while the eastern side would be a protected natural zone. As more or the western land became ready for planting, the work would continue to evolve and change, creating seasonal areas of contrasts between the east and the west zones.
A visitor walking towards the sea would experience the contrast between the two sides: one wild, filled with typical vegetation growing organically and freely, rich in colors and shapes; the other: cultivated fields offering a more controlled and rectilinear vista. The walk would end onto a floating platform, an unstable surface created by the artist, so that, after first experiencing the solidity of the earth, one would feel somewhat unbalanced upon arrival onto the platform.
In this work, the artist wanted the visitor to sense the tides, breathe in the sea, feel the sensation of floating and the shifts of the winds, while being surrounded on one side by structured human activities, and, on the other, by nature’s untamed work.
(Other artists competing for this project were Luc Deleu, Per Kirkeby, John Kormeling and Cornelius Rogge.)