De Profundis, Oerol, Terschelling, 2022, Size: 16x8x5m
Material: Scaffolding, canvas, wooden decking boards.

De Profundis was an architectural installation on the beach Terschelling during the Oerol Theatre Festival. It was a geometrically strict Layher construction with canvas hanging loosely from it. The location’s strong wind was made visible and audible through the canvas and the woodwind sounds coming from the open tops of the steel scaffolding poles; sand kept blowing in and around the work. A large hole had been dug in the middle of the work holding dark, foaming and moving sea water.

The work is intended as a stilled interpretation of the psalm de profundis (from the depths): a plea from humankind to something higher. I am deeply interested in the human quest for something beyond ourselves that might lend meaning to our lives. Sometimes we seem to find it, before we let go. I tried to imitate this pattern in a structure radiating with ambition, yet unfinished and now abandoned. The work exists as a silent and objective witness to the greater purpose its makers must once have had: a snapshot of our quest for meaning, fixed in time.







The closing - (epilogue of De Profundis) - Theatre Festival Oerol, 2022 (video)


In the centre of the architectural installation, I had a large hole dug with a diameter of over 5 metres in which groundwater came to stand. A few days before the digging, I walked onto the beach alone with a shovel, a stick and a rope to mark out for the excavator where the hole was to be, still in great doubt about the work. A day after the digging, after a windy night, the hole was blown half closed. I had to shovel this open again by hand, a process to be repeated every day of the festival, despite it being protected by the canvas. While talking to visitors about the work, the water in the hole slowly swirled due to the wind and a greenish layer of algae was created by sunlight. For me it refers to images of baptism, birth and (the loss of) maternal care.

After the festival and the construction was finished, the hole was definitely closed by an excavator. My filming of this process, without intending it to be so, became a piece dedicated to my deceased mother, who was buried shortly after.