Toren van de Hervormde Kerk te Zoelmond 1890 - 1920

Curator: I see such beautiful decay; a wistful portrait of time folding over itself like pages in a very old, loved book. Editor: Indeed! What we have here is a photograph, titled "Toren van de Hervormde Kerk te Zoelmond," dating approximately from 1890 to 1920. The image, anonymous to the modern record, showcases the Reformed Church tower in Zoelmond, cloaked rather poetically in dense ivy. The artist seemed very interested in how time shapes culture and architecture itself. Curator: Time, and also… how nature reclaims what humans build, right? That cascade of ivy is gorgeous, devouring the tower, softening the edges. Makes you wonder who tended the space and then… didn’t anymore. Editor: Exactly. Consider the Reformed Church itself and the religious transformations that took place across the Netherlands from the 16th Century forward, violently so, it seems like. Images like these allow us to reflect on the religious transitions and spatial consequences enacted over the decades that impacted the people and place. You see that small annex? That indicates to me shifts and accommodations to power dynamics across social boundaries that resonate to today. Curator: You're always thinking of those grand movements! I suppose I’m fixated on the quiet; I see the image, really just see the church fading in and out of visibility like some sort of half remembered song or folk-tale of times gone by, its purpose slowly growing obscured from the viewer... Maybe all it truly takes for us to lose all sense of where and who we have been in a generation. Editor: What’s intriguing about this shot, if you look closely, is how a cultural narrative meets ecological succession and political struggle in this landscape; It all coalesces in that specific time through the lens of photographic documentation. In whose memory did these places need to be recorded, and why. It really emphasizes the temporal distance. Curator: True. It’s heavy, isn’t it? That mix of permanence, of architecture supposedly designed to outlast us, getting tangled with this very vulnerable ephemerality… captured and saved into photograph. The fact is it makes me rethink my assumptions about time. I wonder if anyone is left to care about this specific place anymore. Editor: Right; there's something about the texture—both of the architecture and the leaves—that reminds us that places transform based on human action, the ivy being as invasive as it is beautiful. Curator: Ultimately, this is an intersectional exploration where architecture is not static and timeless, and there is always the possibility that what is will some day not be... and somehow, within that loss we often make art, to preserve some portion.