Ground Sea

Ground Sea presents Hilde Van Gelder’s book project, Ground Sea. More information about this book’s related materials, a leporello entitled … / … and a potential nautical chart, Dover and Calais to Dunkerque and Ramsgate, is available on Hilde Van Gelder’s websites.

www.hildevangelder.be
www.deblinkerd.be

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DOODLES

I had the feeling the world was disintegrating around me
Everything became ugly, distorted, as if someone did it on purpose…
…to try to make me regret it less…
and now…
I can touch the table
Krzysztof Kieślowski, Decalogue II, 1988.

Excerpt from the closing scene (the so-called Resurrection Scene).

@28°36'.011N-17°33'.536W #dolphin #joy #jump #LaIslaBonita #NamelessDay BeforeHolyInnocentsDay #np #Roughsea #TheSearchProject #wild #windy

I AM REBORN IN THE TIME RETOLD IN THIS NOTEBOOK.

Susan Sontag, Reborn. Journals & Notebooks 1947–1963, ed. David Rieff (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2008), 18. Original emphasis.

@gvrvg, @NewRochelle, @SydelleHerzberg, @ThomasPaineCottage, #inspiration, #memory, #moment, #motivation, #MountainofHeart, #thanks, #tour, #treasure

At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, there is a series of pictures painted by the so-called Master of Alkmaar. These are scenes of everyday life, people gathered together for reasons which change from picture to picture; in each group, there is one figure, always the same: lost in the crowd, which is represented as though unaware of being observed, only this person, each time, gazes at the painter (and hence at me) right in the eyes. This figure is Christ.

Roland Barthes, “Right in the Eyes [1977],” in The Responsibility of Forms. Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 240.

@IledYeu, @PortJoinville, #belgium, #community, #DeliriousFrench, #france, #game, #hot, #party, #segregation, #soccer, #summer, #TeenageDaughter, #woman, #worldcup

And under the oppression of the silent fog
The tolling bell
Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried
Ground swell, a time
Older than the time of chronometers, older
Than time counted by anxious worried women
Lying awake, calculating the future,
Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel
And piece together the past and the future,
Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,
The future futureless, before the morning watch
When time stops and time is never ending;
And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,
Clangs
The bell.

T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages,” I:35–48, in Four Quartets [1943], ed. Herman Servotte (Kapellen: Pelckmans and Baarn: Ambo, [1983] 1996), 76.

@Wissant, #breathe, #foam, #LabourDay, #peace, #sand, #shoreline, #snaps, #white

“I would do so knowing that what has been interrupted cannot be resumed, that the gap would remain there always, hidden perhaps but constant, and knowing that a before and an after can never be knit together.”

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow. Volume Three. Poison, Shadow and Farewell [2007], trans. Margaret Jull Costa [2009] (New York: New Direction Books, 2011), 209.

#alliance, #brexitday, #BrexitDoodle, #glow, #shine, #shuttle, #solidarity, #success, #theneutral, #thread, #weave

Some explanatory scenarios:

1. Having an illiterate father encourages the habit of reading.

2. An illiterate father encourages the habit of reading.

3. A literate mother encourages the habit of reading, in light of the limits reached by the illiterate father.

4. A blacksmith works with words. Words and phrases fly from the anvil as the hammer hits the soft red steel: “hammer and tongs,” “strike while the iron is hot,” “mind-forged manacles.”

Allan Sekula, “Polonia and Other Fables 2007–2009,” in Polonia and Other Fables (Chicago and Warsaw: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and Zachęta National Gallery of Art, 2009), 60.

@DoverStrait, @LePasDeCalais, @MessBook, #519SenegalYellow, #931NeutralTint, #cavity, #emptiness, #energy, #EphemeralStampDoodle, #EU, #littlefingerprint, #midstream, #ocean, #qotd, #surface, #thumbprint, #uk

Fifth Deadly Sin: ENVY or VAINGLORY (acedia, id est anxietas seu taedium cordis, et conodoxia, id est jactancia seu vana Gloria). This is Mr Everybody, the man in the street, the perfect citizen of a democracy, the man who wears mass-produced clothes, eats mass-produced food, kisses by the clock and owns a little 5 h.p. car with a registered licence-plate. He is undistinguished and indistinguishable in every way. He votes. It was Gogol who identified him as the latest personification of the Devil, who tries to pass himself off as your fellow creature, your brother. He is the cuckold of the twentieth century! He is universal, he says. And that is the danger.
Watch out, Blaise, there is a lot of talk of making a United States of Europe and Soviet of the East, and they will not want any more free citizens of the world, like you.

Blaise Cendrars, Planus [1948], ed. and trans. Nina Rootes (London: Peter Owen, 1972), 116. Original emphasis.

@lHerbaudière, @Noirmoutier-en-lÎle, #AlmostBastilleDay, #AnnaMammMariLorient, #boat, #fishing, #fishmarket, #handsomeman, #port, #sale, #TheSearchProject

Sol: Now, what news on the Rialto?

Sal: Why yet it lives there uncheck’d, that Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wrack’d on the narrow seas; the Goodwins I think they call the place, a very dangerous flat, and fatal, where the carcases of many a tall ship lie buried, as they say,—if my gossip Report be an honest woman of her word.

William Shakespeare, Act III, Scene 1 (“Venice. A Street”), in The Merchant of Venice [1605], ed. John R. Brown (London: Methuen & Co. LTD and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 70.

@DealMaritimeMuseum, @GoodwinSands, @SheilaLeggs, #antique, #ChecklistDay, #kent, #pottery, #underwater

On 5 April [1982], the British Task Force left Portsmouth, cheered and waved off by a pugnacious and surprisingly bloodthirsty crowd, clamouring for a fight to restore their cheapened honour, a bit of a comedown in comparison with past epic deeds and struggles. After all, in the last long century and a half, this was a nation that had stood up against Napoleon, the Tsar, the Kaiser and Hitler, among others — far too many others.

Javier Marías, Berta Isla [2017], trans. Margaret Jull Costa (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2018), 296.

@CheminDesRougeCambres, @VieuxCoquelles, #fences, #sad, #terror, #view, #winter

Let us make room. Let us fill the holes. Or let us spread and open our arms to let the newcomers into our circle. No matter what we do, it will be a Dance of Death.

I have been living for too long already.
Yet I still want to experience the arrival of the contemporary, of the new middle ages, and not miss the atomic era. I even held on to my seat on the first train leaving for the moon!...

Blaise Cendrars, Bourlinguer [1948] (Paris: Folio, 2016), 337–338. My translation. My emphasis.

#dressup, #ellisisland, #MockLadyLiberty, #mother, #son, #statuecruises, #summer

Except for working for the government …, I don’t think I ever worked anywhere where I was caught in a trap. I know someone who worked in a Navy office, this huge office with little compartments made with filing cabinets. And she shuffled papers all day long, and she thought it was useless, and not much good to anybody, and she put some papers in the wrong file once, and a sailor’s records ended up in the office for dead people. He was still alive, and I used to worry about it. Kept asking, “Did you ever tell anybody you did it? Did you ever try to get them back?” She said, “No, I didn’t want to.” And I’ve often thought about that poor sailor and wondered where he is now? If he was officially dead as far as the records were concerned, did he ever get to come back, get a resurrection? But she felt that she’d cause more damage by admitting that she had accidentally killed someone off, than by just letting it go. She said, “I’m going to get out and I’ll never find out.”

Allan Sekula, Aerospace Folktales [1973], in Photography Against the Grain. Essays and Photo Works 1973–1983(Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1984), 158.

@ThomasPainePark, #hotsummer, #nyc, #TheSearchProject

The architects of the European project have fooled themselves into believing that avoiding mentioning the “D” word is a surefire way to prevent it from happening. For them, European integration was like a speed train — never stop and never look back. Making the European Union’s disintegration unthinkable was the preferred strategy over making integration irreversible.

Ivan Krastev, After Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 3.

@Banksy, @dover, #bird, #BrexitMural, #free, #light, #orange, #painting, #peace, #seagull, #streetart, #traffic, #uk, #wall

“As long as we occupy Calais, we can console ourselves for the loss of Antwerp.”

Saying allegedly expressed by Lord A.J. Balfour to Sir Winston Churchill, then first Lord of the Admiralty, after the Fall of Antwerp on October 9, 1914.

As cited in Jean Lulvès, Calais sous la domination anglaise 1347–1558 (Bern: Ferd. Wyss, 1918), opening statement. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k56126361/f6.image. Accessed April 2, 2021. My translation.

@Calais, @DigueGastonBerthe, #autumn, #beach, #car, #driving, #ferry, #fun, #icecream, #love, #sea

The trip under the Channel was a bit of an anti-climax. We descended into blackness for half an hour and could see nothing. I had hoped for something to happen, but my ears did not even pop.

Eve Darian-Smith, Bridging Divides. The Channel Tunnel and English Legal Identity in the New Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), xi.

#beachlife, #fake, #KingOfTheSkies, #landscape, #painting, #real

and I know your room has no walls
but it really won’t take long anymore
we regain strength in Calais
we regain strength in Calais
and tomorrow we go together to the beach
dreaming of the far side across
waiting just a little more in Calais
waiting just a little more in Calais
we will get there, though it may be awfully slow
though the hours sometimes seem like days here
the nights are long in Calais
without a prospect by the sea
the wait is long in Calais
but son, hold on, really, imagine once:
people see, people hear
they recognize our fate, they went ahead of us
in thoughts they are with Calais
in thoughts with Calais
hope is not taken away from us
for that we didn’t come from so far
waiting just a little more in Calais
waiting just a little more in Calais

Excerpt from Het Zesde Metaal, “Calais,” included in the album Calais, 2016. My translation.

This song is sung in West-Flemish. The Dutch version is published in Wannes Cappelle and Robin Aerts, Zeg alles af voor morgen. Het Zesde Metaal (s.l.: Het Zesde Metaal, 2017), 32.

@BoulevardDesJustes, @Calais, #anxiety, #crisis, #europe, #fearless, #LastDayofWinter, #migration, #shame, #wall

“it consoles me to think that with you my story might even …” He again sought some better word, but again could not find it: “… yes, that it might still float. And that’s really all it comes down to, Jacobo, to floating.”

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow. Volume Three. Poison, Shadow and Farewell [2007], trans. Margaret Jull Costa [2009] (New York: New Direction Books, 2011), 531.

@doggerland, @RoyalHotelDeal, #arrow, #bathroom, #bomb, #fish, #float, #HarpoonDoodle, #kent, #light, #reflection, #sea, #seadog, #submarine, #underwaterworld

Who is she? Where does she come from? Have I encountered her before? I mean one and a half millennia earlier? Does she come from a noble Greek lineage, and did her great-grandmother have an affair with people from Asia Minor, Egypt or Mesopotamia?

Closing lines of a letter drafted by André Jolles, designed to draw out Aby Warburg, and dated 23 November 1900.

As included in Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography [1970] (London: The Warburg Institute, 1986), 108.

@AllanSekula, @Brooklyn, #enigma, #MutinyDoodle, #newyorkcity, #nymph, #street, #summer, #suspense

Now that I know that the quotation comes from Macbeth, I can’t help but realize (or perhaps remember) that also behind us, at our backs, is the person urging us on, the person who whispers in our ear, perhaps without our even seeing him … like the drop of rain that falls from the eaves after the storm, always on to the same spot so that the earth becomes softer and softer until the drop penetrates and makes a hole, perhaps a channel.

Javier Marías, A Heart So White [1992], trans. Margaret Jull Costa (New York: Vintage International, 2013), 68.

@BotanyBay, #beach, #broken, #heart, #kent, #stone, #wet, #white

A fifth time they dug her up years later.
A gaping hole where her heart had been ripped out
to be placed in a reliquary.
Three centuries later physicians would examine it,
would find a wound an inch and a half in length,
the edges of the wound charred
as though by a burning iron.

Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera. The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 159.

@Belle-Ïle-en-Mer, @Sauzon, @ThomasPaine, #beach, #fightforlife, #grave, #heart, #memorial, #OneYearLater, #sauzonforever, #stone

And I notice two days before the show opens that Balcerowicz of Poland and Becker of the University of Chicago continue to agree: the markets are reviving, back off from regulation. Maybe they should spend less time giving each other Nobel prizes.

And yet, under our very noses, [...] a group of immigrant workers in Chicago occupy the factory that is going to fire them, demanding severance pay. Apparently they hadn’t received the Thatcherite news bulletin that “there is no alternative.”

Allan Sekula, “‘PRELIMINARY NOTES’ (Or How Not To Get a Grant From the NEA),” in Polonia and Other Fables (Chicago and Warsaw: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and Zachęta National Gallery of Art, 2009), 63. Original emphasis.

@Ostend, @Ramsgate, #brexitferry, #harbor, #migrants, #TheSearchProject, #worldbeardday, #zerotolerance

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

Second stanza of Leonard Cohen’s song Suzanne, 1967.

@MarinaCadzand, #danceoflife, #EndofSummerHoliday, #kite, #np, #StringReprise, #sunset, #TheSearchProject, #Treaty

It’s nearly ten years since I left the shade of the coconut palms. Pounding the asphalt, my imprisoned feet recall their former liberty, the caress of warm sand, being nipped by crabs and the little thorn pricks that remind you there’s life even in the body’s forgotten extremities. I tread European ground, my feet sculpted and marked by African earth. One step after another, it’s the same movement all humans make, all over the planet. Yet I know my western walk has nothing in common with the one that took me through the alleys, over the beaches, paths and fields of my native land. People walk everywhere, but never towards the same horizon. In Africa, I followed in destiny’s wake, between chance and infinite hopefulness. In Europe, I walk down the long tunnel of efficiency that leads to well-defined goals. … So, under the grey European sky, or in unexpected sunlight, I walk on, counting my steps, each one bringing me closer to my dream. But how many kilometres, how many work-filled days and sleepless nights still separate me from that so-called success that my people … took for granted from the moment I told them I was leaving for France? I walk on, my steps weighed down by their dreams, my head filled with my own. I walk on and have no idea where I’ll end up. I don’t know which mast the flag of victory is hoisted on, nor which waters could wash away the stain of failure.

Fatou Diomé, The Belly of the Atlantic [2003], trans. Lulu Norman and Ros Schwartz (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2006), 2–3.

@DealPier, #autumn, #battle, #battlescars, #gold, #InternetDay, #northeaster, #pot, #rainbow, #rainbows, #TheSearchProject

In the Mainz cathedral
there had been three altar panels,
with facing fronts and reverse
sides painted, one of them
showing a blind hermit who, as he crosses
the frozen Rhine river with a boy
to guide him, is assaulted by two murderers
and beaten to death. Anno 1631 or ’32,
in the wild war of that era this panel
had been taken away and sent off to Sweden,
but by shipwreck beside many other
such pieces of art had perished
in the depths of the sea.

Description of a lost work by Matthaeus Grünewald by W.G. Sebald.

W.G. Sebald, After Nature [1988], trans. Michael Hamburger [2002] (London: Penguin, 2003), 10. Original emphasis.

@MessBook, #deepblue, #lighthouse, #rug, #swim

Calais, Mister President, does no longer belong to the Calaisiens, nor does it belong to the exiles; Calais belongs to the smugglers. Afghan smugglers, but also Egyptians, Pakistani, Albanese, Eritrean, Iraqi, Iranians, Vietnamese. These smugglers, Mister President, rule the town. They regulate transactions. Deliver themselves to diabolic rivalries. Collect and cash money, exact reimbursements, fabricate debts, do not shirk from sentencing — from settling accounts.

Yann Moix, Dehors (Paris: Grasset, 2018), 338. My translation.

#resist

Something in the proliferations of immanence tends to overtake the vertical world, to reverse it, as if the hierarchy bred a particular anarchy, and the love of God, an internal atheism proper to it. Heresy is flirted with every time. And the Renaissance will tirelessly develop and extend this immanent world, which can be reconciled with transcendence only at the cost of threatening to inundate it anew.

Gilles Deleuze, “Zones of Immanence [1985],” in Two Regimes of Madness. Texts and Interviews 1975–1995 [2003], ed. David Lapoujade, trans. Ames Hodges and Mike Taormina (South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007), 267.

@BeauMarais, @Calaiscentre, #BeautifulMarshland, #camping, #DayBeforeLaborDay, #road, #vans, #volunteers

After “breakthrough,” the British witnessed la difference.* The French section was generally swisher and better-lit, it contained a shrine to St Barbara, the patron saint of miners, a “cairn” of champagne bottles and the odd fag-end. The French tunneling machines had girls’ names: the British numbered theirs.

*Note the unconventional spelling “la difference,” an apposite amalgam of French and English.

Martin Latham, “The Secret History of the Channel Tunnel (1802–2001),” in Kent’s Strangest Tales (London: Portico, 2016), 103. Original emphasis.

@dover, #accidentaldiscovery, #boat, #bronzeage, #Kent1992, #love, #WorldsOldestSeaGoingBoat

I could not help reflecting how much more pleasure it must give one to protect life than to take it away; and how much happier [the fisher] must be in catching the fish with no other intention than to feed them, than it can be with us, to first torture them with hooks and then throw them on the ground to expire in agonies.

Anon., “A Voyage to the World in the Centre of the Earth [1755],” in The Faber Book of Utopias, ed. John Carey (London: Bloomsbury, 1999), 140.

whiting¹ ►noun (pl. same) 1 a slender-bodied marinefish of the cod family, which lives in shallow European waters and is a commercially important food fish. ● Merlangius merlangus, family Gadidae.
2 [usu. with modifier] any of a number of similar
marine fishes, in particular: ● a fish of the Indo-Pacific (family Sillaginidae), including the commercially important

Sillaginoides punctatus of Australia. ● the northern kingfish of eastern North America.
– ORIGIN Middle English: from Middle Dutch wijting,
from wijt ‘white’.
whiting² ►noun [mass noun] ground chalk used for
purposes such as whitewashing and cleaning metal
plate.

Angus Stevenson, ed., Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 2025. Original emphasis.

@CaféduMinck, @CalaisQuaidelaColonne, @SpiritOfBritain, #♥lapaysannedesmersmyriampont, #endoftheday, #fishes, #gate, #LastDayofWinter, #man, #port, #proud, #smelledtheroses, #TheSearchProject

In the aftermath of striation, the sea reimparts a kind of smooth space, occupied first by the “fleet in being,” then by the perpetual motion of the strategic submarine, which outflanks all gridding and invents a neonomadism in the service of a war machine still more disturbing than the States, which reconstitute it at the limit of their striations. The sea, then the air and the stratosphere, become smooth spaces again, but, in the strangest of reversals, it is for the purpose of controlling striated space more completely.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia [1980]. Translated by Brian Massumi [1987]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

@AiméThoméDeGamond, @Calais, @HubertClerget, #dirt, #fadedglory, #hotel, #link, #mold, #winter

Although there are only a few of us left who played an active part in the Second World War, for us it’s insulting, an out-and-out mockery, what these pusillanimous, authoritarian fools want to do and impose on us in the name of security, that prehistoric pretext. We didn’t fight those who wanted to control each and every aspect of our lives only to see our grandchildren come along and slyly but very precisely fulfil the crazed fantasies of the very enemies we vanquished.

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow. Volume One. Fever and Spear [2002], trans. Margaret Jull Costa [2005] (New York: New Direction Books, 2007), 369.

@26FederalPlaza, @MelaniaTrump, @ViktorAndAmalijaKnavs, #american, #Americanborders, #BookLoversDay, #borderless, #day, #girl, #immigration, #nyc, #parents, #sunset, #topoftherock, #trump, #usa

This land is you, no, that’s a bit too much, the land allows you to introduce your ideas any time, but only you, well, not quite the only one, but you as well, and especially you, the land allows us nothing, we are nothing and it allows us nothing, even though we would like to participate, it’s better than watching, no?, so that the law also comes from us, so that the law also goes for the people, which we will be then too, but the law does not come and go, and when it goes out, it dresses up, it gets all decked out, but we may not come along, we can’t even get into the restaurant, that’s not justice, even though justice would also come to us, at least it would if it could get some time off for once, and our dream act, unfortunately, passed far away, no, it’s been shot here, the dream pass, by a soccer hero, local off-shoot of foreign parentage, he passed with flying colors, but now its [sic] no longer here, I mean the dream pass, it’s been shot, and the hero does his dream act in Munich now with his passport of our dreams, but justice, which could also come to us, if we belonged to this dream-Volk, the people who shoot dream passes and have the passports we want so much, but don’t get.

Elfriede Jelinek, Charges (The Supplicants) [2013], trans. Gitta Honegger (London: Seagull, 2016), 41–42. Original emphasis.

@Steenvoorde, #dogbirthday, #rockdoodle, #SaintLaurent, #thanks, #twilight, #weddinganniversary

Apparently

the red spots

on Jupiter are

centuries old

hurricanes

W.G. Sebald, For Years Now (London: Short Books, 2001), 18.

@doggerland, @DoverStrait, #AustralianLabradoodleDog, #beach, #british, #calm, #dawn, #DoggerlandDoodle, #np, #PerfectDay, #shingles, #submerged, #TheSearchProject, #winter

But … who is to know the fate of his bones … ?

W.G. Sebald, quoting from Sir Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial (1658) in The Rings of Saturn [1995], trans. Michael Hulse [1998] (London: Vintage, 2002), 11.

@ChannelTunnel, #AllSaintsDay, #bonespurs, #cemetery, #control, #graydays, #mobilisinmobile, #room, #SebaldDoodle, #security, #train, #VieuxCoquelles, #view

The “Insulinde” barely had taken a southerly course when an enormous, entirely unexpected ground sea rose up from the depths. It broke with thunderous violence over the ship and seemed to engulf everything. Not much of the “Insulinde,” listing some 70 degrees at least, remained above water…’ This single short sentence from a rescue report presents us with the main danger of the Dutch coast: a ground sea. A ground sea comes on howling at a place and a time that no one suspects it. Every seaman there knows that on the banks and grounds he may well expect such a deadly breaker, and he is on the alert for it, even though there is little he can do against the immense power of the water.

Piet Bakker, Storm op de kust. Reddersvolk tussen de grondzeeën (Amsterdam: Van Holkema & Warendorf, 1942), 36. My translation.

@MessBook, #boat, #deepthroat, #dutchflag, #funnel, #groundswell, #waves

Last Updated 26.09.2025

GROUND SEA. PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE RIGHT TO BE REBORN

This page introduces Hilde Van Gelder’s publication Ground Sea. Photography and the Right to Be Reborn (Lieven Gevaert Series, vol. 30 – Leuven University Press, 2021). Since 2024, this book is available for free download through OAPEN.

Ground Sea, Photography and the Right to Be Reborn, Volume I

Ground Sea, Photography and the Right to Be Reborn, Volume II

Imagine a world in which every individual has a fundamental right to be reborn. This idle dream haunts Hilde’s associative travelogue that takes Allan Sekula’s sequence Deep Six / Passer au bleu (1996/1998) as a touchstone for a dialogue with more recent artworks zooming in on the borderscape near the Channel Tunnel, such as by Sylvain George and Bruno Serralongue. Combining ethnography, visual materials, political philosophy, cultural geography, and critical analysis, Ground Sea proceeds through an innovative methodological approach. Inspired by the meandering writings of W.G. Sebald, Javier Marías, and Roland Barthes, the book develops a style both interdisciplinary and personal. Resolutely opting for an aquatic perspective Ground Sea offers a meditation on the indifference of an increasingly divided European Union with regard to considerable numbers of persons on the move, who find themselves stranded close to Calais. The contested Strait of Dover becomes a microcosm where our present global challenges of migration, climate change, human rights, and neoliberal surveillance technology converge.

In what follows here, Hilde sheds light on how a specific book by W.G. Sebald both encouraged and inspired her to start up a process of slow writing, of which Ground Sea is the concluding outcome. You might want to read it as a letter from Hilde to you. It starts with a short report on how she set the first steps to dealing with the disorderly ordered collection of “objects of interest” that forms Allan Sekula’s last project The Dockers’ Museum (2010–2013) [TDM, as researchers name it for the sake of convenience]:

While editing Allan Sekula. Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum, a book published as vol. 19 in the Lieven Gevaert Series (Leuven University Press, 2015), I looked around for relevant examples of researchers who had worked on posthumous book publications. This led me to purchasing the second edition of W.G. Sebald’s Campo Santo, carefully edited by Sven Meyer, which came out in August 2013 with Fisher Verlag. As is well-known, the prose part of this book contains a report in four sections of Sebald’s journey to Corsica, and may be understood as a tribute to the culture and beauty of the island. Coincidentally, it was on the last day of a family vacation in the small village of Lecci near Porto Vecchio on the « Île de Beauté » in August 2013 that the tragic news of Allan Sekula’s untimely passing in Los Angeles came through early one morning.

In Campo Santo Sebald’s Corsica pieces, as gathered by Meyer and translated into English by Anthea Bell, end with a section bearing the French title « la cour de l’ancienne école » [The courtyard of the old school]. Quint Buchholz’s pen and colored ink drawing on paper from 1989, entitled Die Befragung der Aussicht (III) [Questioning the View (III)] closes the text part. As we learn from the narrator’s short comment on the picture, Buchholz first sent the image purposefully to Sebald, after which Sebald mistakenly mailed it to one of his Corsican regular correspondents. However, Sebald’s erroneous inclusion of the picture in his letter to this woman, who he identifies as Séraphine Aquaviva, turned out a lucky shot. She — although a bit bewildered and puzzled that he had sent it to her — identified the illustration as a representation of the closed gate in the yard of the old school at Porto Vecchio that she had attended in the 1930s. The view beyond the gate and wall remains indeterminate.

Below, I explain how this indeterminate aspect triggered my imagination. But first, I want to address a key element of Sebald’s text. In Corsica, he reports (English ed., pp. 29–30),

…the dead … were not regarded as beings forever at a safe distance in the world beyond the grave, but as family members still present, although in a different condition … There are many stories of their appearances and the methods they used to announce their presence. Until the very recent past, there were people living who … heard a dog howling at the wrong time, or … the beat of drums from the darkness of the maquis.

Sebald notes that the dead — though invisible and largely intangible — nonetheless continue to dwell among the living. For centuries, people have called these invisible presences the Muses. Sebald’s Corsica texts somehow transmitted, from the world beyond the grave, that it would be fine to take as much time as needed for studying and observing carefully the uncontrollable amount of research materials that I had at my disposal, which seemed at first sight rather obscure, and, yes, at times quite intransigent. From that time on, I rested assured that the objects under investigation would in due course come to “speak” to me as if they had sourced me instead of me having found them — and here I am referencing Daniel Palmer’s fascinating study Photography and Collaboration, published with Bloomsbury in 2017.

I started sending out various emails to potential interlocutors, and requested installation views from all the places where Sekula exhibited Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum (or items from it). Bruno Serralongue sent wonderful shots he made in San Francisco, where he and Sekula jointly exhibited work in late 2011, in a show curated by Hou Hanru, bearing the title Oceans and Campfires. Sekula there integrated elements from Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum in order to engage in a dialogue with Serralongue’s selection of works. It turned out from viewing these installation shots that Sekula there, on the mezzanine level, also exhibited a much older work bearing the same title “Ship of Fools.” For a long time, I did not know what to make of these small-size photographs, and simply presumed that the work must have been chosen because of the similar title “Ship of Fools.” As a result, I initially paid fairly little attention to this work.

This changed, however, when the Vancouver Maritime Museum turned out responsive too, and sent installation shots from their exhibition entitled Lured, organized in late 2012. From observing these views, I understood that the older “Ship of Fools” sequence was only the second part of a larger, quite unknown photographic sequence bearing the title Deep Six / Passer au bleu, largely produced in 1996 in Calais and Dover, and completed in 1998. The other part, Part One, was not present in the exhibition. Yet, by means of a wall text, Sekula had made sure to indicate to his audience that it existed, and that it bore the title “The Rights of Man.” This rather coincidental find rang a bell. I went back to my notes and indeed recollected that, in 2005 already, Sekula and I had considered a new collaboration that would investigate the situation in Calais, building on his 1996 project. Back then, I had merely doodled this in the margins, but now this extremely tiny detail became the central focus of my research:

A page from Hilde Van Gelder's personal notes, penciled during interview conversations with Allan Sekula, Brussels, Oostendestraat 58, 2005. © Photograph: Hilde Van Gelder.

Upon inquiry with the artist’s widow Sally Stein and Allan Sekula Studio Manager Ina Steiner it turned out that hidden away in Sekula’s archive there were original installation views of how he exhibited the work in 1998 in the museum of Valence (France) before it traveled back to its home base, the then Museum of Fine Arts and Lace in Calais, which originally commissioned it. After its return there, it remained in the Calais museum as a “sleeping beauty,” and it took almost twenty years before anyone aside from the museum staff took any interest in this “precious jewel” (as I call this work in my book, Ground Sea). We exhibited it in Barcelona in 2017 as part of the exhibition Allan Sekula: Collective Sisyphus (and made a publication). It is important to emphasize that this sequence of thirty-three photographs bears the bilingual title Deep Six / Passer au bleu: in both the English and French languages the verbs “deep six” and “passer au bleu” are synonymous expressions meaning to “make something disappear, to take away all trace.” So, this work somehow appeared to have performed a perfect vanishing act. Not only did its subject matter deal with “sending someone or something to the bottom,” as Sekula wrote in a letter to Annette Haudiquet, then director of the Calais museum; but also he himself buried it away in what Orhan Pamuk, in his fascinating novel The Museum of Innocence (2008), has fondly called an “empty museum” (p. 679). Of course, these empty museums such as the small Museum of Fine Arts in Calais are not literally empty; but the fact is that they own collections that hardly anyone ever inquires about. Contrary to the work that immediately precedes it, Sekula’s well-known Fish Story (1989-1995) (with which we combined Deep Six / Passer au bleu in Barcelona), the Cibachrome photographs of Deep Six / Passer au bleu are framed without overmat, giving them a very dark shine, a glow — when looking at them it is as if you are observing a disassembled film noir.

Allan Sekula, Sea France Renoir en route between Dover and Calais [Photo decor, portrait of Jeanne Moreau], cibachrome matt photograph, framed measure 29 x 36 cm, part of Part 2, "Ship of Fools" – 2e volet, "La Nef des fous," from Deep Six / Passer au bleu, 1996/1998. Courtesy and © Allan Sekula Studio.

After completing the book on Sekula’s Ship of Fools / The Dockers’ Museum in 2015, I started to research Deep Six / Passer au bleu in greater depth. Initially I largely pursued this with the intention of better grasping why he connected it to TDM, about which by then we at the Lieven Gevaert Centre in Leuven had a large research project underway, in collaboration with M HKA, Antwerp (now the home of the TDM-collection). At the same time, its subject matter led me back to some of my earlier research interests on the Calaisis.

On June 23, 2016, the EU rocked on its foundations as the result of an insufficiently anticipated pro-Brexit vote. A couple of months after the Brexit vote, in October 2016, the French authorities indeed dismantled the infamously named “Jungle” at Calais, and laconically announced that herewith they had dealt with the problem for good.

This somehow proved the final encouragement that I needed: from then on, it was clear that I had to go myself to the maquis of Calais, as Sylvain George identifies the marshland near the Port of Calais where the infamous Jungle once used to be. Sebald, in the Corsica texts, identifies the maquis out there in Corsica as “that vast space still almost untouched by human hand” (p. 30). I desired to verify with my own eyes a similar space in Calais about which certain fellow humans wanted to pretend as if it was still untouched by human hands, and I was determined to wander around everywhere where it proved necessary to go. Whereto would these inhabitants of the “other Calais” have gone? It seemed impossible to believe that they had disappeared entirely, as some news reports wanted to make us think. From inquiring around with acquaintances at the Museum in Calais (with whom I already was in touch in relation to the Barcelona exhibition), it became clear that this was a complete fable and that, in order to hang out safely around there, I would need some camouflage to protect myself. So, I went alone, well-prepared (or so I hoped) in an old car with a Belgian license plate (which in France always connotes a sense of innocence) and I was accompanied only by my dog. The first trip turned out to be a game changer. From then on, I was convinced that I would have to step out of the indoctrinated logic of learned specialisms/divisions/ parochialism (hokjesmentaliteit, we say in Dutch), in which some art historians and perhaps so many others find themselves. I also came to understand such logic as a cage for both thinking and writing to which people tend to confine themselves, voluntarily.

The disastrous situation in Calais required me to move away from any possible complicity with the stigmatizing logic of “migration crisis” or “transitory migrants.” Even the label “humanitarian crisis” seemed entirely inadequate, because nothing — neither an outcry for humanitarian help, nor any expression of indignation — appeared to be effective for changing one single damn thing over there. It was Walter Benjamin who encouraged the author to become a producer, and so I decided that I had to start right there and then with unlearning to exclusively be a photo theoretician; and that I had to start integrating a certain practice involving fieldwork without however creating works of art; as the art world today, unfortunately, is subjected to a range of complicities with highly problematic hegemonic mechanisms from which I wanted to keep steering clear. In the relatively untamed way of proceeding that was the result of all this, I tried never to lose sight of precision or detail.

And so the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. I could now understand Sekula’s Deep Six / Passer au bleu as a work marked by a firm sense of premonition, or what Pierre Bayard, in Le Titanic fera naufrage (2016) called a “sleeping anticipation” (p. 169). Works of art and fiction, such as novels, do not exactly predict the future. Yet some among them have indeed anticipated historical events before they actually happened. The principal importance of such hypersensitive works, says Bayard, resides in the fact that they “help thinking the unthinkable.” In his remarkable book, of which the title translates into English as The Titanic will be shipwrecked, Bayard takes as his point of departure a novel published in 1898, which he saves from oblivion. This novel by Morgan Robertson, entitled Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan, sketches the story of the ocean liner Titan sinking in the North Atlantic Ocean after having hit an iceberg. Fourteen years later, on April 15, 1912, this sadly came true. To James Elkins I owe numerous insights on what artists actually know, but here I point at one element only, which is the “tacit knowledge” that they appear to possess, and subsequently convey via their works (see Elkins’ What Do Artists Know?, 2012, 48). Although this knowledge remains very hard to define — is it non-verbal, implicit, intuitive or, on the contrary, highly procedural and methodic? — the consensus reached involves an agreement on the fact that this type of knowledge adds different insights to the present-day hegemonic knowledge economy, as Elkins calls it. Tacit knowledge is intimately connected with the artist’s hypersensitive ways of being in contact with empirical reality. I want to argue that tacit knowledge contains both abovementioned aspects: it is as much intuitive as this non-verbal type of pursuing research is methodic and needs to follow strict, if rather idiosyncratic, protocols. It can be highly anticipatory and predictive of realities that are not yet there, but which may happen in a not so faraway future.

In an interview with Jean-Pierre Rondas shortly before his sudden death in 2001 (published in »Auf ungeheuer dünnem Eis«, 2011) Sebald shed light on how he pursued research: in a diffuse manner. Proudly he clarified that for refining his approach he had been contemplating at length how dogs run through a field. His was a way of proceeding exactly as a dog searches: to and fro, back and forth, sometimes slowly and at times fast until, eventually, there is a find. One should never think that this way of searching for the unknown is marked by chaos. On the contrary, it requires precision, focus, discipline, and skill. “As a Dog finds a Spoon” is the title of this conversation. Early in the morning on January 31, 2020 I paid a visit to Sebald's grave in St. Andrew's Churchyard, Framingham Earl, Norfolk, UK — what my dog and I ended up finding later that day is revealed in Ground Sea. It was a "kairological" day, to borrow a term from Tim Ingold (The Life of Lines, 2015, 21): a time of rupture and departure for the UK but also a space of twenty-four hours that showed in an exemplary way how we might continue to aspire for more harmonious relationships of "kinship," as Ingold has it (p. 26).

I close with a short coda that pays tribute to the lives of people on the move, many among them tragically lost, and whom Georges Didi-Huberman has named firefly-peoples (in his Survival of the Fireflies [2009] 2018, 84). It shows you a clip of the opening scene from Sylvain George’s film May they rest in revolt (Figures of Wars I), as recorded in the park opposite the street from the Calais Museum of Fine Arts, where Sekula’s Deep Six / Passer au bleu is preserved. Three anonymous Ethiopians engage in rhythmic hand clapping while singing Orthodox Christian church songs in Amharic. You will watch and hear them sing, first, a song about God’s miracle, God who protects them and who is believed to never leave them alone. Then, follows a song about the Virgin Mary, who will salvage and rescue them, and who will dry the tears of Ethiopia. Since one cannot reproduce songs in a book, this page is an optimal platform for sharing a moment of communality together by means of a song. Right after finishing this ritual encouragement and moving tribute to the faraway homeland, as George made us understand, the men straightly say to the camera: “Thank you. Now we are ready for loss.”

Excerpt from Sylvain George, Qu’ils reposent en révolte (Des Figures de Guerres I) [May they rest in revolt (Figures of Wars I)], 2010, video, black-and-white and color, 2h 30 min. © Noir Production and Sylvain George.