27 September–16 November 2025 / Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Lange Nieuwstraat 7, 3512 PA, Utrecht
Exhibition visits on Thursday–Sunday, 12:00–18:00
Or by appointment, info@casco.art
Once a vast delta of rivers and peat swamps, the Dutch landscape as we know it today owes itself to the polder—flat, low-lying tracts of land reclaimed from the sea, lakes, and rivers, secured by dikes and sustained through intricate systems of canals, pumps, and drainage works. What began as a struggle against encroaching waters soon transformed into a sweeping project to master, reshape, and engineer the environment, crystallizing modernist ideals of progress and human dominance over nature.
Today, about a quarter of the Netherlands lies below sea level, much of it reclaimed land. Fertile and highly productive, these polders have long anchored the Dutch economy, sustaining agricultural expansion and securing the country’s status as one of the world’s leading exporters. Yet such gains have also come at a heavy price, bringing soil degradation, biodiversity loss, disrupted water systems, and the destruction of natural habitats, along with deep social and cultural consequences.
Against this backdrop, and with the agricultural transition now underway, Rerooting in the Polder turns to questions of living in and relating to the land. Conceived by Frisian artist Wapke Feenstra—co-initiator of the artist collective Myvillages (2003) and Rural School of Economics (2019)—the exhibition critically engages with inherited notions of land as an economic asset and commodity, centering its exploration on the Dutch polder. Rather than simply retracing its history, the project unfolds as an inquiry into what a more sustainable future for this landscape form might look like.
Debates around polder management and agriculture—especially amid climate crisis and ecosystem collapse—have led Feenstra to reflect on the limits of policy frameworks and top-down transitions. In a sector where “knowing becomes measuring” and visions for change remain elusive, the artist proposes an alternative lens. By bringing agriculture and culture into active conversation, Rerooting in the Polder calls for a more imaginative approach to “poldering.” Technical solutions, she argues, have already shown their limits. What is needed is a cultural shift.
The project approaches the polder landscape as both a deeply personal terrain and a culturally constructed one. Resisting abstract or detached readings, Feenstra highlights how it is lived and learnt, while situating these dimensions within the broader social, political, and economic forces that have shaped the land. The polder thus emerges not simply as a system of spatial planning, but as a layered and complex archive of memory, practice, and meaning.
At the same time, the artist critiques dominant visions of the polder as a purely productive rural landscape—kept physically and functionally apart from the city—and the perpetuation of this divide. Infrastructures such as dikes and canals, together with planning policies and economic models, have entrenched this separation. Challenging these inherited boundaries, Rerooting in the Polder brings forward often-overlooked agrarian histories embedded within (sub)urban contexts, particularly in Utrecht, Leidsche Rijn, and Haarzuilens, while also extending into communal artistic inquiry in the Boterhuispolder near Leiden.
As migration and urbanization reshape the countryside, traces of rural life can still be found—surfacing in geological layers, archaeological remains, and, as the artist shows, in everyday landscapes. But she reminds us that material traces alone do not tell the whole story. Just as crucial is engaging with rural cultural mindsets carried across generations—modes of relating to the land that, despite ongoing developments, continue to shape life along the rural–urban continuum, even when felt as separate realms. Subtle and often invisible, it is in the attentive care for these quiet inheritances that other ways of being with the land might be reimagined.
Rerooting in the Polder brings together earlier and newly commissioned works that invite attunement to one’s own ways of sensing the land. Carefully built environments—at once intimate and collective—allow the polder to take shape in the imagination of those who dwell within it. Through embodied and affective encounters, the project reflects a desire to reconnect: to return, perceive anew, and take root again in an ever-shifting terrain, reimagined not as fixed ground but as a continually negotiated space.
