At the Schiehaven, in the middle of Maasstad Rotterdam, artist Maud van den Beuken opens a Sediment Station. She brings silt from the bottom of the Nieuwe Maas and the Nieuwe Waterweg onto dry land, to stimulate us with this muddy material to reflect and talk about the border area between land and water.
Rotterdam is proud of its river and the Netherlands is known worldwide for its expertise in dredging and water management. But we rarely stop to think about what it means to keep the river in its current form. Every day, millions of kilos of silt are dredged away to provide the port of Rotterdam with an efficient water highway. While efforts are being made worldwide with increasing success to give rivers their own rights and a voice, and space for ecological recovery, the question is also being asked in the Netherlands whether all this dredging is still necessary now that port activities are increasingly moving towards the sea. In this area of tension, Van den Beuken makes a powerful symbolic gesture: she interrupts the routine in which the silt is silently removed as unwanted 'mud', and makes it a meaningful presence in the city. At the edge of the water, along the hard quay walls, this unwanted silt becomes a metaphor for a constructive muddiness and polyphony for which there is currently little room
June 1-28: Sediment Station
Throughout the month of June, Van den Beuken can be found at the Sediment Station, processing sludge and speaking to the public. She invites them to weigh sludge and hang it in filter cloths. In this way, not only is a growing installation being collectively built, but visitors can also experience with their own hands how the water-saturated sludge blurs the idea of water and land as separate entities. The sludge, which is neither land nor water, opens up space to speculate about a more pluralistic approach to the river landscape. What does it mean to
to artificially maintain the hard boundary between land and water? How much silt is dredged away for you every day? Whose interests are served by this? What voice does the river itself have in this? Would the muddy silt, which is not desirable in the current contour of the river
is, can represent this unheard voice?
Opening hours
Wednesday to Friday from 15:00 to 20:00
Saturday and Sunday (incl. Whit Monday) from 2:13 to 00:18
Address
Festival heart Schiemond
Schiehaven 17
3024 EC
Rotterdam
June 6-28: Discussion program with scientists
View the discussion program .
Van den Beuken’s artistic practice is in constant dialogue with scientists, landscape architects, ecologists and dredging companies, who she not only asks to share their knowledge but also to expand their perspectives with her. The public can share in this through a series of reading groups and in-depth events. Guest speakers such as river morphologist Jana Cox and urban planner Han Meyer will explore in conversation with Van den Beuken how we can train ourselves to think differently about the interface between land and water—more complex, muddier, more inherently entangled. The scientists will put themselves in the shoes of an entity from the river landscape, to give voice to a sediment particle on the riverbed, a grain of cement in the urban development, a drop of water that moves fluidly between river and atmosphere.
