Art on Land That Did Not Exist a Century Ago
Forty minutes east of Amsterdam there is a province that was open water when Rembrandt was alive, when Van Gogh was alive, and when most of the grandparents of today's travellers were born. Flevoland was pumped dry in three stages between 1942 and 1968, sits about four metres below sea level, and became the twelfth and youngest Dutch province in 1986. It is the largest piece of land humans have ever made, drawn on paper first and planted afterwards. Almost nobody puts it on an itinerary. We think that is a mistake, and the reason is art.
The largest sculpture park in the country, with no fence
Since the 1970s the province has invited artists to work directly on this new ground, and the result is Land Art Flevoland, a collection of monumental works scattered across the polders, free to visit, open at every hour and in every weather. Nowhere else are so many landscape artworks gathered in one place.
Robert Morris opened the series with Observatorium, near Lelystad, two earthen rings with notches that catch the sunrise at the equinoxes and the solstices, a Stonehenge built on land that was seabed twenty years earlier. Richard Serra's Sea Level, in Zeewolde, is two concrete walls two hundred metres long that run along a canal at exactly the height the water would reach if the dikes were not there. Standing at the deepest point, with the wall above one's head, is the fastest way to understand what this province is. Marinus Boezem planted De Groene Kathedraal in Almere, poplars set out on the floor plan of the cathedral of Reims, a Gothic nave made of trees that took eighteen years to grow. Daniel Libeskind cut his Polderland Garden of Love and Fire into a field outside Almere, five lines and three canals that link Salamanca, Berlin and Almere on a map only he could read. Piet Slegers shaped five hectares of farmland into Aardzee, Earth Sea, with waves of soil and paths of shell. And Antony Gormley set Exposure on a breakwater at Lelystad, a crouching man twenty six metres tall, made of 1,800 steel bars, looking out over the Markermeer. Locals gave him a nickname that our Storykeepers will happily translate.
The collection keeps growing. Paul de Kort's Pier+Horizon, near Kraggenburg, rebuilt part of a six kilometre breakwater and set reed rafts turning in the wind. Bob Gramsma's Riff, PD#18245, in Dronten, was cast in a hollow dug into the old Zuiderzee floor for the centenary of the 1918 law that started the whole reclamation. And in the Waterloopbos, near Marknesse, RAAAF turned the concrete flume where engineers once tested the Delta Works into Deltawerk//, a ruin more than two hundred metres long, cracked open and flooded on purpose.
The territory is the other half of the story
The art only makes sense with the land around it, so we build the day on both. The Houtribdijk, the 26 kilometre dike that runs across the water from Lelystad to Enkhuizen, is the spine of the visit. Gormley's man sits at its Lelystad end, and Moniek Toebosch's sound work Engelen plays on the drive across it, angels' voices over the water through an app, which is the most Dutch sentence we have written this year. At Lelystad, Batavialand tells how the sea was closed off and drained, next to the harbour where boats leave for the Marker Wadden, a new archipelago of islands that did not exist ten years ago and is already full of birds. Just south, the Oostvaardersplassen, the wetland at the heart of Nieuw Land National Park, appeared by accident when a corner of the polder was left undrained, and became one of the most important bird reserves in Europe.
In the Noordoostpolder, the older half, two former islands sit stranded in the fields. Schokland was the first Dutch site on the UNESCO World Heritage list, an island that was evacuated in 1859 and now rises a few metres above the farmland, with ten thousand years of human traces under it. Urk is still a fishing village in its habits, with a harbour, a lighthouse and a fish auction, and it still speaks its own dialect, even though the sea it faced is now a lake and the island is now a hill. Lunch there, or in one of the farm restaurants of the polder, keeps the day honest.
OUR WAY OF DOING THINGS...
Our Storykeepers turn a museum into a story your clients will retell forever. The painter, the history few people know, the room to linger in, the dot that connects the history with the now. Art, told by people who love it and know how to make it fun. In Flevoland the museum has no walls, and the dot is the water itself. A Storykeeper who knows the polder can stand a group in front of Serra's wall and explain why it is that height, drive them across the Houtribdijk while the angels sing, and end the day on Schokland explaining why an island can be landlocked. The land art becomes the excuse to tell the story of how the Dutch made a country, which is the story travellers came for in the first place.
Good to know for travel advisors
Flevoland works as a full day from Amsterdam, by private car with a Storykeeper, and the works are far enough apart that a car is the only realistic way to see more than two. We pair the land art with Batavialand and the Marker Wadden boat in the summer months, or with Schokland and Urk for a quieter, more historical day, and clients with an eye for architecture get an hour in Almere, a city built from scratch in the 1970s with buildings by Rem Koolhaas and Herman Hertzberger. Land Art Flevoland runs its own guided bus tours on the last Sunday of the month from May to September, and for private groups we design the route around the works that matter most to them. Comfortable shoes, a windproof jacket and a low horizon are the only requirements.
Every other art destination in the Netherlands shows what the Dutch painted. Flevoland shows what they built, and then let artists loose on it.
