The Hedwigepolder, where nature development and agricultural history intersect, mirrors broader social and ecological issues. The depoldering of the Hedwigepolde, and the intense debate it provoked, reveals how deeply rooted the relationship between people and landscape is, and raises questions about identity, heritage, and the role of humans in shaping and preserving their living environment. The Hedwigepolder is particularly compelling because multiple layers of meaning and conflict converge within a single, clearly defined landscape. The landscape is located at the Dutch/Belgium boarder, a so called ‘two-country polder’. Its ‘de-poldering’ was carried out as ecological compensation for the deepening of the Western Scheldt to facilitate the expansion of the Port of Antwerp, linking a locally rooted agricultural area to international industrial and logistical interests. Over generations, the polder had been shaped through farming practices: dikes, field patterns, drainage systems, and soil management embody accumulated human labor and knowledge.
At the same time, the creation of tidal “new nature” challenges conventional ideas of what is considered natural. A carefully maintained, human-made landscape is replaced by a designed ecological system, exposing how notions of nature are themselves culturally and politically constructed. For residents and farmers, who were to be dislocated, the Hedwigepolder represented family histories, daily routines, and deep attachments to place. Resistance to the de-poldering was thus not only about land ownership, but about loss, recognition, and agency.
The Hedwigepolder makes visible how decisions about landscape and place are often made at a distance, through policy documents, legal frameworks, and abstract models. The contrast between administrative language and the physical transformation of the land exposes underlying power relations.
Taken together, these aspects make the Hedwigepolder a concentrated case study for broader questions of landscape transformation, heritage, ecology, and the human role in shaping our environments.

In my proposal, I take the calculative logic underlying the design of the Hedwigepolder as a starting point.
The installation is a landscape intervention that references the polder’s former role as a site of agricultural production. Its form is inspired by a manure cellar, an underground storage space traditionally used to collect and store liquid manure from livestock, typically built beneath a large scale industrial farms.
In this work, the structure is revealed through the excavation of the land, the land that is escavated is now used for the ‘Panoramaheuvel’.
Visitors can enter the work: within a narrow network of corridors, the expansive view of the landscape is turned inward. At the end of this system, the space opens into a cut-out that functions as a platform within the polder, restoring a wide, open view across the landscape. This cut allows water from the Scheldt to flow into the structure with the tide. As a result, the artwork is periodically submerged and at other times emerges, becoming accessible and visible to the public.