Ter Post

Travelling Farm Museum
in Leeuwaarden

In the Summer of 2024 Txell Blanco and Merel Zwarts from The Outsiders explored the Frisian landscape and it’s cultural and ecological past and present during a residency at VHDG. With an old fire truck, we visited farms, permaculture gardens and nature reserves in and around Het Bildt, where once the Middel See waters dominated the landscape, turned into a polder around 1500, now covered with potatoes and other crops. Exploring Fryslân, researching landscapes and land use, meeting their inhabitants, following the wind and waters from the city to the sea. A landscape consisting of dykes, Terps, wet lands, clay, salt marshes, sea, grass and crops. We took our found stories, treasures and sediments with us. We reflected on our encounters and experiences through post packages with our experimental TERPost post-coastal postal service. We transformed the truck into an alternative postal office. We transformed our findings into over 500 packaged with letters, observations, photographs, soil, recipes or crops. Small invitations for correspondence among the local inhabitants and us to dream about the pluriversity of our lives and lands. Do sleepy dykes dream of salty waters? Do potatoes long for breaking the grid? Does the sea wish to flood the land? Does the water wish to deliver its sediments? Does the Frisian wind wish to share their secrets? Dear polder, does your soil wish to stay contained? How do you imagine your state of being in the salty marshes of the future?