Volcan aux Pays-Bas

/ Volcano in the Netherlands

Maintenant les Pays-Bas est doté d'un volcan : un symbole de la puissance de la nature. Il relativiserait notre "souci de l'espace" qui était le thème de l'exposition "Out of Space".

En fait ce volcan (de la turbe) crache de l'eau du canal, au lieu du feu, pompée par les visiteurs. Ce projet conçu en janvier est devenu tout à fait ad hoc à cause de l'explosion du volcan islandais en printemps 2010.

Vous pourrez voir le volcan en eruption sur youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh4YbIY6U5A

People pumped up water from the canal and let it jet out from this heap of peat (i.e. soil of this region). This installation is my answer to one of the exhibition themes: "stress from a lack of open space". My miniature-volcano will bring people to mini-nirvana (relative quietude), reminding them of the strong power of the nature and of their humble existence.

I'd got the idea of this project in January, it became really ad hoc because of the eruption of the volcano in Islandl in the spring 2010.

You can see haw it errupt on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh4YbIY6U5A

Text from the catalogue of Out of Space

Dear Dutch people,

In school, Japanese learn that Holland has a density population as high as Japan. But the geography of the two countries is so different that the similarity is only limited to the statistic number. Contrary to the flat land of here, 73% of Japan is occupied by mountains, and 50% of the population lives in the plains that take only 14% of the territory. Real concentration of population is incomparably much more dense in Japan than in Holland. Therefore Japanese must be more stressed from "a lack of open space", but it seems to me that they are fairly free from it (although they suffer from other kinds of pressure). In my opinion, this difference between the Dutch and the Japanese suffering from stress is due to the nearness to the mountains in the landscape. And especially I want refer to the volcano and its eruption. Being confronted by such a strong power of the nature, we Japanese feel very small and we are deeply conscious of our humble existence.

Therefore I offer you a healing toy, miniature-volcano. Its eruption may bring you to miniature-nirvana: relative quietude facing the violence of the destiny.

Best regards,

Eizo SAKATA

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Note : I had this installation work to one of the questionings of "Out of Space": desire for open space. Pat van Boeckel was afraid that the pomp I had brought would not be strong enough for the public use, he proposed me a plan to make a protection structure using remain of wood of Maurizio Perron's work. And it is Maurizio that cut out the shape. Therefore I owed a large part of realization to these two. In such a way, I kept my usual approach of creation "Passivité active", open attitude to the situation.