Restless
Luc Devoldere | Chief Editor
In September 1999 Amsterdam's Vrolikstraat was draped in washing. Together with the other residents of the street where she lives, the artist Ida van der Lee had created the art project she called Laundry is Great. Strictly speaking you're not allowed to hang laundry in public places, let alone right across the street, but this playful infringement of the rules was a clear expression that things were going well again in Vrolikstraat, which had suddenly taken on a Mediterranean look. The 175 clothes-lines strung from one house to the other quite literally connected people of different backgrounds. The laundry project had a huge impact. Residents invited their friends and relations to come and admire their sociable street. People chatted spontaneously to each other. People felt part of the street and the neighbourhood again, and they liked that. Vary the language a bit, and it's called social cohesion.
And that's what the themed section of this yearbook is all about. How good do people feel in the Low Countries, still after all a prosperous delta area? Comfortably discontented, as the poet says? How do they cope with the way of all flesh known as ‘ageing’, with the welfare-and-happiness supermarket and with their lunatics? And were they unhappy, or just restless and bent on profit, four hundred years ago when they and their ships sailed the seven seas?
For on 4 April 2009 it was four hundred years to the day since Henry Hudson sailed out of Amsterdam harbour at the behest of the voc - the United East India Company - on a voyage that led to the ‘discovery’ of Manhattan. On 3 September he reached the mouth of a river which Giovanni da Verrazzano had already discovered in 1524, but which would soon bear his own name. He sailed up that river for nearly two hundred kilometres, almost to the present town of Albany.
When it became apparent that it did not offer a passage to the Pacific, Hudson lost interest in it and turned back. Not until 1624 did the first thirty families, most of them Walloons, settle in New Netherland. A couple of years later, in 1626, Peter Minuit - whose Protestant parents had left Tournai in what is now Belgian Hainault and taken refuge in the North - would go down in history as the man who bought Manhattan from the indigenous people for a handful of trinkets.
Hudson will be honoured in New York for a whole year. But the so-called ‘Quadricentennial’ of the links between the Netherlands and America has to be more than just a commemorative year. It must also be a festival, at which the tradition of tolerance and diversity native alike to the Netherlands and to New York will be celebrated.
In this yearbook we again aim to display a sample of the diversity of art and culture to be found in that delta region once sneeringly labelled ‘that indigested vomit of the sea’ by the seventeenth-century English. Writers, painters, visual artists past and present, culture managers, landscape architects, the Veluwe's cultured nature and naturalised culture, Belgians who speak German, conflict management in Belgium itself as the political consultative model seems to have reached its limits, architects, musicians, film-makers, sociologists and philosophers. They all help to shape this part of Europe.
So are all those people who live in the Low Countries happy or unhappy? Let's just say restless. Always on the move. It could be worse.
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