In The Netherlands, boulders found in the northeast of the country hold an almost mythical quality. In fact, the Dutch call them “zwerfkei” – “kei” meaning stone and “zwerver” meaning wanderer or someone without a home. The reason these boulders hold such mystery is that The Netherlands is a country of sand and clay, and such large rocks have no place there. “Geologists found out that these stones came here in the Ice Age from Scandinavia, pushed by glaciers,” explains Amsterdam-based artist Bart Eysink Smeets.
While he was doing some general research into boulders (“just because they’re nice and resemble the only piece of ancient nature we have in the Netherlands”), Bart discovered that you can precisely pinpoint where in Scandinavia each rock came from. “When I found out about their specific origins, I knew right away: after 200,000 years, it’s time to bring one of these wanderers home.”
Once Bart had the idea to return a boulder which had found itself stranded in The Netherlands to its rightful Scandinavian home, he set about making it happen. The point of the project was to show the “weird but beautiful relationship the people in the northeast of the Netherlands have with these boulders,” so it needed to be a “public stone.” In turn, he would wander the streets until he found a boulder lying on a street corner or roundabout somewhere, call up a municipality in The Netherlands and ask: “I am standing next to a boulder on this-and-this street, and I was wondering who is in charge of this boulder?”
Several government meeting rooms and community groups later and Bart finally found a stone for his project. “It was lying on a roundabout near Borger. A geologist told me the type of rock was Ålandrapakivi. That means it’s from the Åland islands*, a group of islands in between Sweden and Finland,” he says. Bart began crowdfunding and the project gathered attention from the press, which led to a big problem. “I got an email from a guy named Ferry.” He was upset because Bart had decided that the stone be returned home without consulting the stone at all.
* Note: Åland and Finland are not in Scandinavia, but next to it.
“I was a bit speechless by the whole thing,” Bart says, “so Ferry mainly did the talking. He explained my intentions to the stone and asked: ‘Do you want to go home?’ The stone replied: ‘I don’t like it here.’ I explained the place I had in mind in Åland and the stone started smiling. The stone would love to go there.”
The story of a stone returning to Åland had made the papers there and so Bart was contacted by their customs department who told him that whoever would be receiving the stone would need to pay the import taxes. It was decided that as the goods were being returned 200,000 years later, the stone’s value was a mere €0.50 and so the tax was forgotten about.
Bart set off to Åland, with the stone on a trailer so it could “look around and see what has changed in the landscape”. He held a farewell ceremony at which the mayor gave a speech and a fanfare saw the pair off. “When I arrived in Mariehamn there was a radio reporter who interviewed me live on the radio.” While the leaving ceremony had been entirely planned by Bart, he left the welcome ceremony to the city of Mariehamn.
“A poet made a great story about the stone, they invited all the people called Sten (Stone) as VIPs and got a trumpet player to play a tune celebrating the return of their long lost child. Also, the mayor of Mariehamn gave a speech. When everybody left the scene it was just me and the stone. It was weird, because I really felt like I was leaving behind a friend.”
Read the full article with all photos by It's Nice That (I have abridged the article a little)
