Halve plak van de Drie Steden 1534 - 1579

Curator: Standing before us is a piece titled "Halve plak van de Drie Steden," dating roughly between 1534 and 1579. It is crafted from metal. Editor: It’s small, unassuming really. Immediately it gives me the impression of time worn… almost melancholic, a memory faintly surfacing from murky waters. Curator: Indeed. This object, what survives of it anyway, functions almost as a kind of "cultural seed," pregnant with associations to the alliance of what we now know as the province Friesland: Franeker, Harlingen, and Leeuwarden. The Drie Steden. Editor: You're right; it whispers stories of mercantile leagues and perhaps shared defence... All those practical agreements made symbolic by, what looks like a double headed eagle right? Such an emblem has a long and layered association with imperial power and protection across Europe. The piece itself, it is quite abraded along its edges and surfaces isn't it? Do we know how it became damaged? Curator: It’s fascinating, isn’t it, to consider how daily use, the very handling of it, can lead to erasure. It creates a mystery. Yet, those images are still discernible enough to point toward an awareness of an international order in contrast to a purely provincial scope of influence and ambition. Editor: I imagine, even worn and slightly broken, to someone back then it was bursting with significance. It’s a common enough thing, that desire to materialize values through these tokens, which have echoes today. The images are also surprisingly abstracted. Or perhaps time did more damage that is at first apparent. Curator: Both erosion and abstraction meet. Think of Carl Jung's theory of archetypes. It speaks to a collective unconscious expressed in similar imagery across vastly different cultures over millennia, perhaps what you noticed, despite its being partially defaced. It hints at the ways certain images resonate in the depths of our psyches regardless of conscious knowledge. Editor: It also has such an unpretentious quality to it... no grandeur despite its symbols of might. Curator: And this intimacy offers another symbolic portal. It gives clues to a set of negotiations between the self, its rulers, and the cultural moment from which it originates. Editor: This has made me ponder about worth: what endures, what vanishes and how we re-animate the past via this old, curious fragment of a coin. Curator: Yes. May this interaction spur the listener to ponder what lies submerged beneath the weight of objects.