A place like The Hague was partly built on sandy dunes, but a lot of its suburbs were once marshes.
Indeed a great part of the two Holland provinces and many other areas were once marshland.
Marshes and peaty wetlands have become rare in Europe.
Their misty mysticism with strange sounds and misleading witte wieven, banshees, dangerous, dark waters, deceptive will-o’-the-wisps or hinkypunks was once respected, but later on these areas were exploited and drained, efficiently made useful for our insatiable needs.
At Billytown Anders Dickson (1988), Maja Klaassens (1989), Clémence de La Tour du Pin (1986) and Kim David Bots (1988) co-operated to give an impression of this lost marshy mysticism, but without getting one’s feet wet.
For once Billytown has been obscured a bit from the outer world by some worn textile and indeed from itself by a wooden fence that seems to have stood there already for ages.
Strange sounds and scents that both attract and repel will invite you to discover all kinds of strange objects, installations, pictures and creatures.
Modern marshes are also disrespectfully used as dumping places for all kinds of garbage, but, in spite of what you might think of it, the creatures and things of the peat seem to feast on it, celebrating their own downfall.
What else can one do?
© Villa Next Door 2020
Contents of all photographs courtesy to the artists and Billytown, Den Haag.
Bertus Pieters
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