„Walkman“ Project – Gallery Achterstraat, Hoorn, Holland (1988)

Press statement

“I will walk through the streets of Hoorn collecting discarded objects and other rubbish lying around. I will tie these materials onto a string and, walking backwards, I will drag them along the surface of the roads of the old city to the deconsecerated church which is the gallery of the Achterstraat artists. I will pull the string objects along by placing the string around the back of my head, holding it to my ears with my hands. In this way I will be able to hear the otherwise inaudible sounds of the objects as they scrape along the ground. I will record these sounds on tape. Once back at the church I will hang the string objects up from the ceiling or lay them out on the floor. I will relay the sounds I have recorded in the room. I will repeat this action every day for the three weeks of my stay in Hoorn.”

Comment in retrospect

Hoorn is a picturesque old harbour town north of Amsterdam. Three hundred years ago ships of the Dutch East India Company used to sail from here on their journey round Africa to the East. They stopped at the southern tip of Africa, now Cape Town, bringing provisions (and also women who had been recruited from the area around Hoorn……)

I think I was hoping with my action to pick up the sounds of the ghosts of three hundred years ago. But that didn’t happen. Instead, I found myself in the role of a madman walking around town collecting things that other people had thrown away. No-one spoke to me, some were hostile. I was isolated and disliked but with a freedom that other people didn’t have – the freedom to collect and handle the objects of their intimite past, to drag them publicly through the town to the old church and to lay them out to let them speak.