This latter attitude towards the environment of letting the sea and rivers occupy inhabitable and cultivated land seems to stand in polar opposition to what may be deemed the main project of the Netherlands since the 14th century, namely that of land conversion through the establishment of ‘polders’—tracts of land enclosed by dykes. The proverbial saying “God created the Earth, but the Dutch created Holland” is indeed clearly visible in the geography of the Netherlands through a cartographic, grid-like expanse of land mass, established after a process of reclaiming land, recovering flood plains and marshes that has lasted for several centuries, from the 14th to the 20th century. The Netherlands currently knows around nine thousand polder areas, for which the Flevopolder is perhaps the pinnacle of makability and ingenuity as the world’s largest artificial island. Parts of this reclamation of land can be read in light of the aforementioned resilience and survival tactics, the protection and defense against the elements—through the construction of dykes, sluices, pump stations, delta works, the Closure Dyke (Afsluitdijk). Simultaneously, the process of land conversion should be read as a coalescing desire to expand a limited amount of available landmass to be recovered in the key of agricultural profitability, going hand in hand with increased industrialisation, and, ultimately, the indexation of land on the vectors of capitalism—eighty percent of current available land in the Netherlands is used for agricultural purposes, among predominant forms of monocultural crop and industrial livestock farming. Land that was initially deemed as worthless and useless, such as peat marches, were excavated for turf—a type of carbon fuel—and subsequently converted to be fit for agricultural purposes. These same peatlands, that have now run scarce, are deemed to be of great value as carbon sinks within the climate crises we are currently facing. 

The exhibition SCENES FROM THE POLDER WESTERN is the outcome of a four-year long-term research project situated in the Netherlands, defined in relationship to the previously described interplay of land, sea, watery infrastructures, and the diverging aims, hopes and aspirations of the different stakeholders concerned. In 2020, Mata Dupont and Roux began interviewing climate scientists, sea level researchers, hydraulic engineers, artists and educators working in the field of water management, as well as people whose lives are intimately related to the sea and the land, among water millers and farmers. They spent time travelling around the country to discover the different landscapes of the Netherlands: polders, rewilded lands, farmland, artificial islands, storm surge barriers, and dykes. This early extensive fieldwork and interdisciplinary research provided the artists with new and more nuanced understandings of the Dutch landscape and its historical development.

During a residency with Waterwerken on the Brienenoord Eiland in 2022, Mata Dupont and Roux wrote the first iteration of a screenplay for the film—that was published in 2023 by Building Fictions, an imprint based in Amsterdam—entitled SCENES FROM THE POLDER WESTERN, from which this exhibition at RADIUS equally lends its title. In that, Mata Dupont and Roux used a mixture of narrative techniques, references from musicals, as well as the lexicon and tropes of the Western genre, expressing the tangled challenges that humans face in this environmentally vulnerable country. In their work, they draw on the incongruous parallels between a story set in the Netherlands and the North American myth-making of the Western genre, bringing forth territorial and cultural specificities of the Netherlands through a humorous play of contrast. Following its adaptation into the film LOWLAND MELODIES, A POLDER WESTERN, the screenplay presents a series of different characters—partially informed by and modelled after the aforementioned interviews and fieldwork—facing mysterious, uncontrollable weather events due to the North Sea reclaiming land. From a disillusioned climate activist dubbed eco terrorist to a duo of dyke keepers encountering an abnormally large hole in a dyke, from a Rijkswaterstaat policy maker launching a charm offensive to regain the trust of both board and public to a misunderstood climate scientist, and a compromised, somewhat nostalgic farmers family, the films gradually unpacks and inscribes a series of characters onto an assemblage of relations within an increasingly unstable living environment. The film takes the shape of a series of vignettes depicting different political perspectives and forms of relating to territory, the environment, and community, defying traditional understanding of borders and forms of living, as a lens to look at the tumultuous relationship with water. The vignettes function as a fragmentary prism, and much alike the characters in the film, they seem to revolve around a common ground that is precisely lacking: the characters are singularities turning in on themselves, in a process of becoming increasingly destabilised, but never quite arriving on the same page. Perhaps not dissimilar from the dutch verb ‘polderen’ and its political equivalent of the ‘poldermodel’—to describe the often slow process and model for reaching consensus among different stakeholders—LOWLAND MELODIES, A POLDER WESTERN provides a representative indicator for and status quo of the widespread dissensus the Netherlands is currently facing in relation to facing climate change and implementing relevant policies to mitigate its negative consequences. From agri-business-as-usual, political indecisiveness, the post-pandemic undermining of science fact and its institutions, to the increasing dissatisfaction of different social groups in all rungs of society, Mata Dupont and Roux shed light onto the blurry and watery frontier of the lowlands.