Dutch artists contribute to exhibition ‘A World of Water’ at the Sainsbury Centre - United Kingdom
Dutch artists contribute to exhibition ‘A World of Water’ at the Sainsbury Centre
Ambassador Paul Huijts had the honor to open the exhibition ‘A World of Water’ at the Sainsbury Centre on Friday the 14th of March in Norwich. The exhibition covers topics ranging from centuries old trading routes, to colonisation, and from coastal protection to human-induced environmental and climatological crises that are affecting life in and around the world’s seas and oceans.
The ‘big question’
Sainsbury Centre has asked itself for this exhibition – Can the
Seas Survive Us? – is a reversal of the question we often ask
ourselves in the Netherlands. A large part of the Netherlands
consists of land that has been drained of water. Millions of
people live below sea level. So the biggest challenge we – in the
Netherlands, as well as communities along the Norfolk and Suffolk
coast – are faced with is to protect ourselves against the sea,
taking climate change and rising sea levels into
consideration.
In this exhibition you will see solutions by Dutch designers to build in ways that make us more resilient against rising tides; and you will also see that centuries ago, lots of Dutch people, who were specialized in turning floodplains into habitable land, came to Norfolk and Suffolk to build dikes and ingenious drainage systems, which enabled thousands of people to live safely in places that were previously under constant threat of flooding.
This illustrates that the connections between East Anglia and the Netherlands go way back. The Netherlands and the United Kingdom are neighboring countries, ‘North Sea Neighbours’. For centuries, it was quicker and easier to travel by ship from Norwich to Noordwijk, than it was to travel over land from Norwich to London. The exhibition takes visitors on a journey of human-ocean relations. It also shows that preserving our ecosystems is now more vital than ever before.
