‘Hands in the Deep Grounds’ for the Marker Wadden in the Markermeer, (2021, Piet-Zwart Institute, group project)
What: Literary research, field research, cooking, video making and editing, sound design
Role: Researcher, director and editor, designer
The first part of a site specific group research project focused on the human-built islands called the Marker Wadden on the Markermeer. Here, the most striking aspect of the project for us has been the way that the islands were created. The islands are made out of many places that have accumulated into one place due to different forces and over time. Looking back at the history, there was already land in this place several times, then again it was flooded by the sea. However, at the present moment you can step on dry ground because humans have influenced the way of deposition of sediments. Fascinated by the interplay of time and geological forces, the main question in mind was what “natural“ forces are.
We couldn’t help but notice the similarities between the process of the deep layers being formed through millions of years; and the process of cooking. Keeping this in mind, we took the theme back to the interior and tried to understand the ground we are standing on through one of the most domestic acts known to man: the act of cooking & baking. Through an activity that seems rather mundane, we talk about the forces that shape the geological layers of the Marker Wadden, and we learn about their structure and composition. Marker Wadden is like a layer cake, it consists of many different layers that refer to deep time and tell us stories about their creation.
Deep time is not an abstract or distant prospect, but rather a spectral presence in the everyday. The era of the human denotes how industrial civilization has changed the earth in ways that are comparable with deep-time processes. Hearing out scientific experts who study a wider time span than the so-called “thick present” leads to a wider understanding of the changing planet. Considering the forces that shape the layers of the planet can help someone think about further developments. It is crucial to understand the process of those forces in order to be able to think ahead; and this is why we chose to work with the process of cooking and baking and embraced its lightness of it, so we could have a more holistic idea about the formation of the grounds we stand on from a domestic perspective.
Group members: Agnes Tatzber, Bahar Orcun
The research we did during the project consists mostly of strata analyses and drilling reports. With drill data reaching back almost a century from today of the Marker Wadden area, we were able to make a section view of the island landscape and dig deep in Deep time and Deep grounds. You can see in the images below how the section view was made and how the layers were formed over the years with thickness and depth included.
With this data, an overview was made for every strata layer focussing on composition, period of time, origin, color, properties and time zone name. This resulted as a basis to work on recipes, castings and prototypes for the cooking video, which you can see in the material research booklet down below.
For the final presentation of the project, we made small exhibit-able excavation boxes for the visitors besides the cooking video. With these boxes the viewer could actually experience every layer in real life by eating it, since every layer was prepared to eat.
All the recipes of the cake layers were given to the visitor in the form of a cookbook in which both the real composition and ingredients of the strata layer and the cake layer it had to symbolize were given.