Rerooting in the Polder

Lees in het Nederlands

Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons is pleased to announce its 2025 Autumn artistic program, Rerooting in the Polder, an exhibition by Frisian artist and long-term Casco collaborator Wapke Feenstra. Co-initiator of the artist collective Myvillages (2003) and Rural School of Economics (2019), Feenstra has spent several decades investigating the ecologies of land—its physical, mental, and social dimensions—by tapping into local knowledges and engaging with people and the everyday. Through her work, she gives form to ways of living with the land that have eroded over time, that which persists, and the potential that lies therein.

With Rerooting in the Polder, Feenstra’s long-standing engagement turns toward the Dutch landscape, offering particular attention to the distinctive form of the polders: flat, low-lying tracts of land (re)claimed from the sea, lakes, or rivers, made agriculturally productive and protected by dikes, and maintained through an intricate network of canals, pumping stations, and drainage systems.

Rather than simply retracing its history, the project unfolds as an inquiry into what a more sustainable future for this landscape might look like. Ongoing debates around polder management and agriculture—especially amid climate crisis and ecosystem collapse—have led Feenstra to reflect critically on the limits of policy frameworks and top-down transitions. In a sector where “knowing becomes measuring” and visions for change remain elusive, she proposes an alternative lens.

In the exhibition, Feenstra approaches the polder as both a deeply personal and culturally constructed terrain. Resisting detached, abstract readings, she foregrounds how the polder is lived and experienced—through senses, emotion, embodied memory, and position—while situating these within the broader social, historical, and economic forces that have shaped the land. Thus, the polder emerges not merely as a system of spatial planning, but as a complex archive of shared practices, values, and ways of knowing.

The exhibition features both former and newly commissioned works—including large-scale textile pieces, murals, photographs, geological animations, paintings, and films—that invite visitors to attune to their own sensory and emotional relationship with the land. Both intimately felt and collectively produced, the project reflects a desire to reconnect: to return, sense anew, and root again in an ever-shifting terrain.