Reading Landscapes, Losing Roads

A map of North Brabant we had rendered unusable for navigation hung in a field near Oploo. Enlarged to the scale of a billboard, it was suspended from wooden gallows. Beneath it, sand-filled jute sacks dangled in the wind.

The map began during Landscape Adrift: Following the Wayfarer. Before visiting locations, we annotated it with prosthetic memories: stories, images and accounts through which places had entered our lives before we encountered them ourselves. On arrival, we added our experiences. When space ran out, we blacked out passages and wrote over them. Roads disappeared beneath descriptions. The map accumulated information while becoming progressively less useful for finding the way.

Along the way, we encountered a mythical creature called Flodder, said to leap onto the backs of passers-by after dark and make their journey unbearably heavy. The name caught us because of the 1986 film about a working-class family moving into a wealthy neighbourhood, a fixture of our youth. We put the creature on the map.

Looking for stories we had grown up without, we were still being guided by those we knew. What else do we pass without noticing?

An invitation to “Home Is Where the Art Is”, organised by Bob Copray, Eric de Haas and Wytske Poelsma, brought the map to a field beside the farmhouse where Bob and Wytske had begun hosting gatherings for networks and neighbours.

Research into the surrounding area brought us to accounts of executions at Oploo’s boundaries and of local judicial authority over accusations of witchcraft. Those accounts made the boundaries on our map harder to read as mere divisions of space: they also marked the reach of a power to judge and punish. We asked Bob to build gallows for the map, using a historical image as a reference.

From across the field, the apparatus of punishment was visible before any story could be read. Coming closer brought the inscriptions into view; the gallows remained around them.

We had worked with jute before, drawn to its histories of trade, transport and labour: a fabric used to carry things elsewhere. Here, the sacks carried sand. Their weight pulled against the wooden structure; the wind set them swinging beneath the map.

During the gathering, visitors found familiar locations among the inscriptions. Accounts attached to places they passed every day prompted recognition and surprise. Reading required coming closer, following an annotation, losing the road beneath it.