Dutch Hills

The Netherlands is a small western European country with a population of well over 16 million people. Most of the landmass of the Netherlands is below sea level. Driving through the Dutch landscape is like driving through a highly designed and efficient outdoor machine. This landscape has all the wonders of industrial modernity, enormous steel windmills, high speed train tracks, high voltage power lines, a sophisticated system of pumps and canals that keep this landscape from flooding. The Dutch landscape is about transport, technology and agriculture. Every square centimetre of the Netherlands is designed and accounted for. This landscape is very flat, it has straight roads, straight canals, anything out of place stands out immediately. The series of photographs called ‘Dutch Hills’ features small temporary hills made from earth, bricks or dirt, waiting to be spread out over the land or fill up holes. Some of these hills are gone in days, sometimes weeks. You can tell by the amount of weeds growing on these hills if they have been there for a while. These hills seem like spontaneous sculptures, the only unruly and abstract phenomena sticking up in this otherwise flat and orderly landscape.

Raimond de Weerdt