·L·e·a·k·y··W·a·l·k·, during international visual theater festival Cultura Nova and my Greylight Projects residency, continued traces of past walks and other artistic experiences by letting these leak onto the streets and paths of Heerlen and its vicinity and into the memories and stories of the participants.

For this walk, I sewed 16 small leaky bags out of self-dyed canvases and fermented canvases. At the start of my residency, March 2023, I dug a one-meter-deep hole into the soil in the garden of Greylight Projects and I buried a canvas in this hole for five months. After these five months, the canvas was decomposed by snails, spiders, centipedes, beetles and other soil animals: resulting in a canvas with stains and holes of different sizes.

A year prior to this walk I cultivated a piece of land with exactly the same size and dimensions of my studio. I sowed tagetes and woad, plants which can produce dyes. I am interested in shifting perspectives through perception. With the field as a temporary studio, I investigate such shifts by working the soil and processing plants to create dyes. The dyes were used to color canvases and the dried flowers were taken to my Greylight Projects studio and became a ·L·e·a·k·y··W·a·l·k· ingredient.

Other ingredients to fill-up the porous bags were soil from Kunrader and Sibber quarries, soil from the Greylight Projects garden, river sludge from the river Waal, tagetes, birdseed and limestone. Small heaps of these ingredients were placed around my studio for participants so that they could fill the leaky bags.

In response to ·L·e·a·k·y··W·a·l·k·, poet and curator Roy Voragen wrote a meandering text, which was inserted into the bags.

We left the premises of Greylight Projects and walked in a single line and each of us carried a leaky bag to leak ingredients, and collectively we created traces along the way, traces that could become, over time, something else. We returned the same way as we came so we could witness the traces we had been creating.

On return to Greylight Projects we exchanged thoughts, reflections and questions while enjoying coffee, tea and pastry.