The installation Traay is about the place of my childhood and the ground on which I grew up, which holds great value for me. Traay is the name of the street in Driebergen-Rijsenburg – on one side, the house where I lived, on the other side the forest of the Utrechtse Heuvelrug, with its pine trees and sand dunes.

This year I longed to revisit this place again. When I was there, I captured the trees with their aerial roots. The scans I made of them consist of floating particles, as if they were grains of sand. Digitally I set them in motion. They float freely for a moment, as if a memory is fading, before coming together again to form the image of the tree with its roots. This visual language also appears in my earlier works.

At the same time, I connect with the place by showing images from my family archive. I discovered that my father's gaze, while making these films, was focused on how we interacted with the ground. You see my mother, brother, sister and me. We dig up the soil, make a mess, and with our spade and our hands, we connect with the ground.

For the istallation I made a montage of sounds, related to the soil, the ground and Earth. Sounds I use, among others, are slowed down rubbing of fingers in sand I took from the sand dunes by a lake in my childhood forest. Another sound refers to the Schumann resonances, also called 'Earth's hum'. Global electromagnetic resonances generated and excited by lightning discharges in the cavity formed by the Earth's surface and the ionosphere. The lowest peak of these can be found at 7.83 Hz. I made this inaudible frequency audible with two frequencies that have 7.83 Hz as the difference between them. 

The sounds are played with a subwoofer and speakers in and around a dedicated box I made for the audience to sit on. Not only are the sounds audible this way, they can also be felt through the vibrating of the box.

Traay (2026)
2 channel video, asynchronous, 5.55 min and 1.40 min
2 channel audio, 1.58 min 

Onder het plaveisel, het strand (a Vloed exhibition)
Curator: Anika van de Wijngaard
Leiden Art Hub