The somewhat clunky, yet strangely melodic title for this work came from a song Song by Daniel Norgren that I stumbled upon by chance. The project, which accompanied me throughout my second year at Werkplaats Typografie, originated in a reading group. At the height of the pandemic, I met with three friends every two to four weeks via Zoom to discuss texts dealing with the Anthropocene—a term I had never heard of before our first meeting.

The pandemic tied the other participants and me to the Werkplaats Typografie building on Agnietenplaats in Arnhem in an almost monastic way. So I looked for ways to translate theoretical reflections into physical experiences and tangible objects under these circumstances. I initiated a small series of excursions that took me and other interested participants to various locations in the Netherlands—including, for example, the IJsseloog, an artificially created island and, at the same time, a silt deposit in the province of Flevoland, which itself consists of land artificially reclaimed in the 1960s. A leaflet with fragmentary texts was published for each excursion.

The project’s base camp was a group shelter in the basement of the Werkplaats Typografie building, where a bright orange tarp marked the site of our gatherings. There, I organised a week-long programme of field research workshops, film screenings, and a communal meal. The program was accompanied by four readers, each dedicated to a concept from my research: “Urgency,” “Trouble,” “Repair,” and “Hospitality.”