‘The Netherlands is finished – we will not change a thing about it’. I had the plan, once, to start a political movement with this as motto. I never did – I was thinking about public space, but it was interpreted as ‘nobody out, nobody in’, which was far from what I meant.

It cannot be denied that the Netherlands is a strange combination of densely populated and empty. The Randstad (roughly Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam, The Hague) is densely populated, the rest is rather empty. When will we recognise the fact that we are not a nation but a city-state?

I tried to capture the populatedness and emptyness of the netherlands, and the sharp demarcations between, in a series of dioramas. I recently inherited my father-in-law’s slide boxes (minus the slides, fortunately).  The boxes were too good to throw out – but I  had no specific goal for them. When driving back home from the family get-together where I got the boxes handed to me,  I had a brainwave:  they are so linear – why not use them to encapsulate some Dutch Space ?

It was fun to do, also the results aren’t half bad.