Lecture at the South Holland Heritage Day conference

Today I gave the lecture ‘Create or delete: Doomed to eternal key to the landscape’ during the Heritage Day South Holland, the annual congress of Erfgoedhuis Zuid-Holland and the Province of South Holland, held in the Schouwburg Kunstmin in Dordrecht in the context of of the celebration of ‘600 years Elisabeth Flood’.

The day is dominated by water and flooding and has been given the title ‘The power of water’. The program wants to devote extensive and explicit attention to the tasks we face in the Dutch delta.

How do we preserve our heritage with a rising sea level? How do we deal with our maritime landscape? How long can you keep raising the levees? What past examples do we know? And are there also foreign examples from which we can learn something? A number of expert speakers will talk about water management in the past and present and provide an analysis of the Dutch maritime landscape. In addition to these somewhat ‘heavy’ subjects, attention is also paid to contemporary initiatives and projects.

In the program of the day, my presentation was announced as follows: Anja de Jong once photographed the Delta Works as part of the Dutch entry at the Triennial in Milan, but while working on her long-running ‘The Borderland Project’ about the global no man’s land, her interest in climate and water issues, which has been her main theme ever since. In her ‘ongoing’ project ‘Monuments of Climate Change’, the interventions in the Dutch landscape, ultimate attempts to keep our feet dry in the future, are portrayed. This work revolves around the question of how long and in what way we can, should or even be allowed to keep the land in the Delta dry and habitable?