This project begins with a simple question: how do we recognise a culture that is not our own?
After moving to the Netherlands, I found myself observing small, everyday scenes. One stayed with me: a birthday celebration inside a house, fully visible from the street. Then another. And another. Slowly, a pattern appeared—familiar arrangements, gestures, atmospheres. A way of being.
These repetitions became a kind of entry point. A way of seeing.
Portrait of a Wet Country is an attempt to work from that position: not to define a country, but to approach it through fragments, impressions, and encounters.
The project takes the form of a series of performative installations. Each work focuses on a different element—windows and curtains, water reflections, interrupted sounds, domestic spaces. Together, they form a shifting portrait that unfolds over time.
It is both poetic and political.
The Netherlands is a country shaped by a fragile balance between nature and human intervention. Water is controlled, land is constructed, space is negotiated. This condition is not only geographical—it is cultural.
