Walcheren sits at the edge of the map, a slab of land ringed by cold water and hard wind. It is where I grew up. You hardly notice how much of it is shaped by WWII, maybe because it is so present you start to think it is normal, like that is how it is everywhere. I grew up with the war not in books but poured in concrete around me. Bunkers like broken molars along the dunes and the fields. We played on, around, and inside them. Once, my friends and I held a contest to see who would dare to jump off the highest one. It ended in blood and stitches and a long, quiet bike ride home. But that is a story for another time.
Now that the last people who remember that war first hand are almost gone, it is more important than ever to remember by the scars, the landscape, the rust, the things that do not speak but will not shut up either. Meanwhile, the mistakes and choices that led to that awful war seem to be echoing again, as if we have forgotten where that road goes.
This series is my way of listening to the land. Walking seawalls and fields. Photographing all that remains, structures, shorelines, small objects that carry a weight you feel in your teeth. I grew up in Walcheren, but the work ranges wider than that. The coast keeps its own archives in many places. I want these pictures to remind us where the road once led, and why we do not go there again.
I would like to do my part in that remembering. I hope you will too.
