Over the course of six weeks, I traveled throughout Friesland in an old milk truck that did not go faster than 25 km/h. This forced me to slow down my pace, taking only secondary roads. That extreme slowness attuned my attention and allowed for meaningful encounters with locals.
I approached locals with a provocative and somewhat absurd request: “I came to take your land, will you give it to me?” Friesland is a Dutch province with a distinctly ambivalent relationship to the dominant culture. Though part of the Netherlands, its people speak their own language, Frisian, in their homes. As an immigrant, I was used to excusing myself for not speaking Dutch. Here, I didn’t speak their language either. Yet that shared experience of not being hegemonic became an unexpected bridge. People didn’t so much understand the request as they entered the game, a meaningful exchange that perhaps had nothing to do with understanding at all.
At Tresoar, the main Frisian archive, I had found a 19th-century contract documenting the excavation and sale of terpaarde — the fertile soil of ancient earthen mounds — transported by barge to enrich depleted land elsewhere. I brought a copy of this contract to each exchange. Faced with proof that land had, in fact, traveled before, the request became harder to dismiss.
I proposed drafting a contract in the same fashion. Only this time there would be no payment. Instead of money changing hands, the land itself would become currency: I would take a piece from one person and carry it to another, who would in turn pass a piece onward — a slow relay building unlikely connections across the territory, parcel by parcel, stranger by stranger.
The owners, mostly farmers, had of course a very different relationship with land than I did. For them, land meant first and foremost soil: weight, volume, labor. My ambitions were quickly humbled when I understood how heavy it actually was. I had to build a device that would allow me to carry at least part of it. In the end, I settled for one cubic meter.
The work rests on a simple provocation: that immovable property (the legal term for land) is not immovable. Land has meant radically different things to different people across time: something to be sold by the spadeful, something to be held in common, something that holds the dead, something that holds a language. To move it, even absurdly, even in a milk truck, is to loosen its grip on certainty.