Onbekend op dit adres

Language: Dutch
2020

When I moved to the Netherlands in September 2020, I was a stranger in a strange land. My attempts to understand and communicate with local inhabitants was vain. One day, during a walk at the flee market, I found a box full of letters. That is how I met Jesper and Saskia. Grasping their content became an obsessing need. In order to understand them, I had to learn Dutch.

How can we create narratives out of cultural misunderstanding and randomness? The content of these letters were formed by Duolingo’s sentences that are assembled in order to create a fictional exchange between two characters. The structure of the sentences is kept unchanged in the writing process as a way to create a troubled comprehension of the message and the expectations of the language. Object, that cannot be unpacked and experienced (tapes, undeveloped films, unrelated pictures), were added to the letters as testimonies to enhance the possibility of the relationship between the protagonists.